Sharing in a Day in the Life of Jesus, First Wednesday (I), January 12, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the First Week of Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Marguerite Bourgeoys
January 12, 2022
1 Sam 3:1-10.19-20, Ps 40, Mk 1:29-39

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

The following points were attempted in today’s homily: 

• At the beginning of Ordinary Time, the Church has us ponder the beginning of St. Mark’s Gospel that helps us learn how to live in the kingdom of God in every time. It begins with the encounter of Jesus and how he calls us to repent, believe, follow him and fish for others to follow him. It helps us to learn how we should be astonished and amazed by the encounter with Jesus, to hang on his words, and to obey them. Today we continue to enter into the beginnings of the public ministry of Jesus and get a glimpse at an ordinary day in his life and how he was filling his full days preaching, healing, praying and sharing himself with others. The way Jesus behaved in Capernaum shows his perennial priorities.
• Jesus began this day in the Gospel by preaching for a long time in the synagogue on the Sabbath, which must have been somewhat exhausting all-day work since people would return home normally only at sunset. Then he went to Simon’s house where he healed his mother-in-law. Soon after that, the whole town was at the door asking for miracles, and Jesus, per his custom, would work with every sick person one-on-one, bringing people into a personal relationship with him so that he could give them an even greater gift, salvation through faith. After that, well before dawn in the next day, he went out to pray. Finally, when the apostles found him and said that everyone was looking for him, rather than rejoice in what might be called “success,” he mentioned that they needed to be on their way, because he wanted to preach the Gospel in surrounding towns as well. “For this reason I was sent,” he said. Such was his passion to spread the faith that he wasn’t just looking for a few to receive him, but for all. He carried out four activities: preaching, healing, praying and zealously bringing the truth to others. These show what he wants to do for us and also how he wants to transform us to be his instruments in doing this for others.
• I’d like to ponder more extensively Jesus’ prayer in the middle of the night. Even though he was exhausted, he still went out to pray. That was how much he desired that communion with the Father. There’s something particularly special about prayer at night, prayer, we can say, that triumphs over the body’s desire for sleep, because it really tests and strengthens the will to choose God over one’s appetites. Jesus was regularly praying at night not only because he was mobbed during the day but because that’s a time in which the distractions of each day are fewer and we can sense the light of God shining in the midst of the nocturnal darkness. This is likewise one of the reasons why adorers who take the “graveyard shift” speak about how special it is. It’s one of the reasons why monks and nuns for centuries in cloisters have arisen to pray matins at about 3 am. There’s something special about prioritizing God in the middle of night, about getting up before dawn to express our desire for God before the sun that symbolizes God rises. Praying at night is not only praying at a time with fewer distractions but often it’s done when everyone else is sleeping, when no one else can notice. These two lessons — prioritizing the Lord in prayer and praying to him, not for the attention of others — are meant to influence our prayer at all times. In In Sinu Iesu, Jesus intimates in prayer to the priest author, “There are particular graces reserved for souls who keep watch before my Eucharistic Face during the night. Those who pray by night imitate My own night watches of prayer to my Father. How often I would keep vigil in the presence of my Father, conversing with Him in the silence of the night and taking up into my prayer the secret cares of a sleeping world and even the groans of creation. You will discover that there is a clarity and a peace in nocturnal prayer that I do not give to souls at other times. … Learn to adore me by night. … I prayed to my Father in this way and in so doing I gave my priests and all my friends an example to follow.”
• This lesson about prayer at night is similarly communicated catechetically we could say in today’s first reading. God called young Samuel to prayer not in the middle of the day but while he was sleeping. We know that after Samuel’s birth, Hannah presented him in the temple and left him there to learn how to serve the Lord. And he would sleep in the temple close to the Ark of the Covenant. The text tells us that at the time “a revelation of the Lord was uncommon and vision infrequent,” something that implies that at the time of writing revelations were common and visions of God frequent, a change that is meant to continue into our present as God reveals himself to us and allows us to see his will in prayer each day. God calls out to Samuel in the middle of the night by name, but Eli, who had been corrupted over time and allowed his family to become corrupt, was slow to pick up on what was happening, and didn’t want to be interrupted in the middle of his sleep. He who probably seldom or ever prayed to the Lord at night didn’t recognize that the Lord might be speaking to Samuel. Eventually, however, he caught on and gave Samuel good advice, to see to the one calling, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” And that’s precisely what Samuel did. In that prayer, we learn a lot. Often we can think about prayer as our work — the vocal prayers we say, the meditations we choose and do — but prayer is first and fundamentally about opening ourselves up to what the Lord wants to give us in his mercy. It’s more about God’s word than our words, his action than our action. The ultimate purpose of prayer is not an exchange of words or ideas but an exchange of persons, and God in grace makes the first move. That’s why we must begin with an attentiveness to his voice, to his presence, to his self-giving. This type of receptive prayer is essential. The text tells us, “At that time Samuel was not familiar with the Lord,” a sign that those with whom he was living, Eli and his corrupt sons, were not really prayerful men. Even though Samuel was raised from his earliest days in the Temple, even though we presume he had learned to recite the Psalms and the Torah, even though he was a “minister to the Lord” already, he was “not familiar with the Lord,” he didn’t know God as a Father, he didn’t see himself as a member of God’s family, he didn’t have a personal relationship with him. That type of personal relationship happens through prayer, the one-on-one dialogue we have with God. God wants us all to be familiar with him in this way through the existential dialogue of prayer. And God mercifully will give himself to us in that way, in the middle of the night when we can perceive him more clearly, so that we can also see more clearly how he’s giving himself to us in the middle of the day. God wants to give us the same gift he gave Samuel, to “wake us up” in the middle of our sleepiness to his presence, so that just as “Samuel grew up, and the Lord was with him, not permitting any word of his to be without effect” and he was known “from Dan to Beersheba … [as] an accredited prophet of the Lord,” so we will continue to grow conscious that the Lord is with us and allow the word he implants with us to bear 30-, 60- or 100-fold fruit, making it possible for us to announce the Lord to others by who we are even before we open our mouths.
• One saint who prayed to God at night and in the day and trained others, like young Samuels, to enter into the existential dialogue of Christian life was St. Marguerite Bourgeoys (1620-1700), who is basically one of the founders of the city of Montreal. She lost both her parents when she was young, but they had passed onto her the gift of their faith in God and sought to help that faith grow. When she was 21, she attended a procession of Our Lady of the Rosary and the statue of Mary looked at her in such a way that it changed the trajectory of her life. She had a great desire to bring Jesus to others and others to him. She entered the confraternity of the Sisters of Notre Dame in her town of Troyes. They were cloistered sisters who had a school inside the convent, but they knew that they needed uncloistered women to go to teach those who would never approach the convent school, and that’s what the Confraternity did. Eventually the brother of one of the sisters came back from Ville Marie in Quebec, what would expand to become Montreal, and he, the civil leader of Ville Marie, described the need for women to come and teach especially the girls and women who were sent there as orphans to have families in the new world (a practice that a few centuries later is hard to understand). She took up the charge to go far away from home to bring others to Jesus and help them learn how to live as sons and daughters of the Father who would not leave them orphans. Eventually the Bishop of Quebec, St. François de Laval, allowed her to found an order called in time the Soeurs de Notre Dame de Montreal. He wanted them to become cloistered, too, since he didn’t think it was fitting for women to go out to teach where so many men would be able to hurt them. But she insisted that Mary hadn’t been cloistered but constantly brought Jesus out and, like Jesus in today’s Gospel, she wanted to go wherever there were people who needed to be taught about God’s word, about his mercy, about the art and Trinitarian shape of prayer. She got her way. And the Church grew quickly in Montreal because of her efforts, with Christ increasing more and more in individual lives and in culture. We give thanks for her life and example and ask her to pray for us.
• The same Lord who spoke to Samuel, the same Jesus who teaches, heals and prays, the same Lord who summoned St. Marguerite from France to help people come to know him in the new world, has called us to this encounter. He teaches us in Sacred Scripture. He heals us from the inside by what St. Ignatius of Antioch called “the medicine of immortality” (the Eucharist) and he prays for us, so that, so healed and strengthened by him, we may use our health, like Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, to serve God and others as we go to other people and even towns as well, because it’s to spread that faith in action that Christ has called us and for which we, like Christ, have been sent!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Gospel MK 1:29-39

On leaving the synagogue
Jesus entered the house of Simon and Andrew with James and John.
Simon’s mother-in-law lay sick with a fever.
They immediately told him about her.
He approached, grasped her hand, and helped her up.
Then the fever left her and she waited on them.
When it was evening, after sunset,
they brought to him all who were ill or possessed by demons.
The whole town was gathered at the door.
He cured many who were sick with various diseases,
and he drove out many demons,
not permitting them to speak because they knew him.
Rising very early before dawn,
he left and went off to a deserted place, where he prayed.
Simon and those who were with him pursued him
and on finding him said, “Everyone is looking for you.”
He told them, “Let us go on to the nearby villages
that I may preach there also.
For this purpose have I come.”
So he went into their synagogues, preaching and driving out demons
throughout the whole of Galilee.

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