Seeking to Save Life, Even of Those Seeking to Destroy It, 23rd Monday (II), September 10, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the 23rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
September 10, 2018
1 Cor 5:8, Ps 5, Lk 6:6-11

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

The following text guided today’s homily: 

• Jesus’ mission was not just to save and sanctify but to revolutionize, to turn right side up, the way his people had distorted religion, to give us new wineskins to receive new wine. This distortion was epitomized by the way they treated the Sabbath, making it a day of extraordinary rules about everything they couldn’t do, rather than a day of loving God with all they had and loving their neighbor. The Scribes and the Pharisees went to the Synagogue on the Sabbath, but they really weren’t going for that reason. St. Luke tells us that their main focus was to “watch Jesus closely to see if he would cure on the Sabbath so that they might discover a reason to accuse him.” The suffering of the man with the withered hand didn’t matter much to them. St. Luke’s term for this man’s hand was that it had “dried up”: in other words, it had once had life in it but no longer did. One of the apocryphal Gospels in describing the scene said that the man was a mason who had been injured on the job and could no longer work and support himself and his family. But such an injured laborer’s plight didn’t concern the Pharisees at all. Even though they would rescue an animal from a trap on a Sabbath, they wouldn’t care for their fellow man, as if restoring him to health would somehow be offensive to God. So Jesus, reading their hearts, asked the question: “Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath rather than to do evil, to save life rather than to destroy it?” It was a poignant question because he was intending to do good and to save life, and they were intending to do evil and destroy life. What Jesus was doing somehow they found objectionable, but what they were doing — focusing themselves on preventing Jesus’ doing good and then conspiring to plot his demise — was somehow licit to do, not only at all but especially on the Lord’s Day. They didn’t answer for obvious reasons.
• Jesus then worked his miracle of mercy, not only to do good to the man with the withered hand and restore his livelihood but do good to his objectors and to all of us by showing us the true meaning of the Sabbath and revealing to us God’s desire to make us whole. He had the man with the injured hand come and stand before everyone, the first of the two steps of faith by which the man would cooperate in his own healing. Then he said to the man, in the second step of faith, “Stretch out your hand!” He was telling someone who hadn’t been able to move his hand for who knows how long to make an act of the will and do the impossible. And St. Luke the beloved physician says something beautiful and noteworthy: not “his hand was restored and he did so,” but, “he did so and his hand was restored.” He extended himself in faith and that was part of his restoration. As this man was stretching out his hand in response to Jesus’, we can, in a sense, imagine an act of recreation in which, reminiscent of Michelangelo’s scene of creation, God stretched forth his hand as his creature likewise did and it was in that action that the breath of life was given.
• Jesus worked the miracle in today’s Gospel not only on the Sabbath but in a synagogue to show that he had come as Messiah to rehabilitate the meaning of worship, indicating to us that to love God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength involves loving our neighbor as he loves them. There is a connection between her worship of God and reverence of others: the same Jesus who says “This is my Body,” and “This is the chalice of my Blood,” is the one who says, “I was sick and you cared for me.” The new worship Christ came to inaugurate involves this union between faith and life, between what we believe and what we do. Our worship of the God of love is meant to transform us more and more into his image so that all of us may make our lives living exegeses of St. Paul’s phrase, “caritas Christi urget nos,” the love of Christ — both subjectively and objectively — compels us (2 Cor 5:14).
• But that’s the big question on which the meaning of our life hinges: Does love really compel us? Is our passion for God something that transform the way we treat everyone else? Do we see that the way we treat the least among us is the way we treat the Lord? Do we grasp that whenever we receive someone in Christ’s name, even a child who was insignificant at the time of Christ, we receive the Lord himself? Do we behave toward each other, even in community life, with the reverence with which we would give to Jesus himself? The Servant of God, Dorothy Day, once said, in a harrowing but enormously helpful point for our daily examination: we love the Lord to the extent that we love the persons we like the least. And so does our relationship with the Lord drive us toward really sacrificing, praying, forgiving, caring for those people we don’t get along with, those who might treat us poorly, those who might even behave as if they despise us? Does Christ’s mission of charity toward us change us in such a way that we, too, become missionaries of charity?
• These thoughts are very relevant for us to understand what was happening in today’s first reading from St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. He had been told that it was now widely known that among the Church in Corinth there was “an immorality of a kind not found even among pagans,” an incestuous relationship in which a man was in a relationship with his own stepmother. That was problem enough. But the bigger problem, St. Paul says, was that they were “inflated with pride” whereas they should “have been sorrowful.” They should have been humble. They should have recognized their need for God’s mercy and for trying to bring those in their community to recognize their need for that mercy. Rather than being ashamed, rather than mourning the offense against God, the damage being done to both the man and his step-mother, and the scandal that was now widely reported, they responded with proud neglect, as if that sin really didn’t impact them. In Corinth, there was so much debauchery among the pagans that people had easily become used to it, and not only were they not properly scandalized, but they also didn’t love their brother enough to do anything about it. Like the Pharisees’ callous heedlessness of the man with a withered hand, they were indifferent to their fellow believer with the withered soul. They were the ancient version of those who were “personally opposed, but” Catholics of today, who would never involve themselves in incestuous relations but who would go on with life as normal despite the rotting souls of those who would come to worship with them on the Christian Sabbath. St. Paul needed to show them the way. The man needed to be excommunicated — “expelled from your midst” — and “deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.” The world itself was considered under the dominion of the evil and St. Paul was saying that this man, as medicine, needed to be shown that by his actions he was cutting himself off from grace, from Christ’s body, from the Church and choosing Satan over God, Barabbas in the disguise of his stepmother over Christ, choosing destruction over life. This would be the means by which, hopefully, the man would come to his senses like the Prodigal Son, convert and return to the path of salvation. Such thoughts are clearly relevant to the situation of the Church today. Many in the Church, especially among the clergy, became desensitized to immorality in our midst, even immorality that honest non-Christians would never engage in. Rather than being ashamed, many in Church leadership tolerated it, with a “don’t ask, don’t tell,” form of ignorance that was anything but blissful. Rather than showing that breaking the sixth commandment and not repenting of it is conduct that separates us from Christ, many priests were sinning and still being permitted to celebrate the Eucharist. And this type of immorality was a cancer that spread to many in the Church who no longer thought that breaking the commandments was a big deal, including the fifth commandment with regard to abortion. Beyond every other sin, this is a sin of failure to love God and love neighbor: the neighbors who were sinning and the neighbors who were being sinned against.
• Paul says at the end of today’s passage that “a little yeast leavens all the dough.” It’s necessary to clean out the “old yeast … of malice and wickedness,” he said, and “celebrate the feast … with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” This is not the “yeast of the Pharisees” about which Jesus would warn the apostles in the boat, but the yeast Jesus would call his Church to become, where one person would be able to lift up a whole neighborhood toward God. We’re called to be that type of leaven. As we prepare to receive Jesus within, the Jesus who can lift up our whole life and through us lift the world, says, “Stretch out your lives!,” and we now beg his help to do so so that we may live true worship through charity and others may no longer widely report that there is immorality among us not of a kind found even among non-Christians, but rather that there is a morality among us that draws even non-Christians to Christ as its source!

The readings for today’s Mass were: