Shrewd and Simple Sheep in the Midst of Wolves, 14th Friday (I), July 9, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Friday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of SS. Augustine Zhao Rong and Companions
July 9, 2021
Gen 46:1-7.28-30, Ps 37, Mt 10:16-23

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

• Today we continue focusing on Jesus’ preparation of the Apostles to be sent out on their training run to prepare them for their post-Pentecost continuation of his salvific mission, Jesus says something truly shocking and absolutely astonishing. The Good Shepherd, the one who would lay down his life to protect and save his sheep, says that he’s about to send the apostles out “as sheep in the midst of wolves.” That would be like sending a bunch of unarmed Christians out into a gang of armed ISIS or Boko Haram members or African-Americans to a Ku Klux Klan rally. He told them that they would be handed over to courts, scourged in houses of worship, led before governors and kings, betrayed by siblings, parents and children, persecuted in one town to the next and hated by all because of him. Why would he possibly send out his sheep into a coven of wolves? Why would he send his loved ones out to be slaughtered? How is this consistent with his loving us?
• Jesus loves us so much that not only does he want to save us but he wants us to be his assistants in saving others and the way both will occur is when we become truly united to him. Basically everything Jesus described that the wolves would do to his sheep and lambs as he sent them out, he himself endured: he was handed over to the Sanhedrin, brought before governors and kings, scourged in civic and religious contexts, betrayed by those he had made his brothers and sisters, his spiritual sons and daughters, hated by so many because he didn’t fit into their categories, and ultimately brutally massacred. But the Lamb led to the slaughter rose from the dead on the third day. And he beckons us to follow him, to love like him, to redeem with him. It’s through this contest with the wolves that Jesus will accomplish the hard work of conforming us with him that few of us would ever choose voluntarily. No matter how many times Jesus tells us to deny ourselves, pick up our Cross and follow him along the narrow road that leads to life, few of us will take him literally and follow up along that bloody path: that’s why he allows the wolves to help us.
• Jesus is clear that as we’re being persecuted in the way he describes we will be able to accomplish the mission he has sent us out to accomplish, the mission of proclaiming that the Kingdom of God has arrived, to heal, to raise from the dead, to exorcise through our incarnating the Gospel. He says we will suffer so that we can be a “witness before them and the pagans,” as the “Spirit of your Father [is] speaking through you.” Jesus doesn’t say merely that “God” or the “Holy Spirit” will speak through us, but the “Spirit of your Father,” because this experience of suffering will convince us more than anything of our Divine Filiation, that the Father cares for us more than he cares for the sparrows and the lilies, that every strand of hair is numbered. At the end of the passage, as he encourages us to persevere in union with him, he reminds us that we will not even traverse Israel before his kingdom comes, before some, moved by our witness, accept the testimony and follow us to meet the Son of Man. This is a powerful message, one that many of us are tempted to duck rather than believe and embrace. We have a prejudice that if we love God, if we’re moral, if we do everything that God asks, that then we will be blessed in this world with friends, with good health, with professional and personal honor, with universal praise for our virtue. Jesus promises us we’ll be blessed, but blessed in another way: blessed with the Cross, blessed with the presence of the Spirit of our Father, blessed with salvation and the opportunity to help save others. He clear articulates the cost of discipleship but says that the price tag is worth it. He sends us out before wolves as lambs and tells us not to be afraid because God the Holy Spirit will be with us.
• As he sends us out he gives us the instruction to be as wise as serpents and as pure as doves. He doesn’t send us out as naive sheep. If we’re united with him, we won’t be naive. He wants the children of the light to be savvier, more prudent, than the children of this world (Lk 16:1-12). He wants us to recognize that there are wolves out there — those that we can see and the spirits of those we cannot see — who will oppose us for no other reason than we represent Him and he doesn’t want us naively to walk into their trap. Jesus himself repeatedly avoided those who were trying to entrap him because his hour hadn’t yet come. But as we are savvy in this way, he wants us at the same time to be as pure, as simple, as single-minded as doves, focused on God and how he is with us in every moment seeking to save us. He wants us to be docile and united to the One who came down upon him in the Jordan under the form of a dove. That is the way we will be able to give him the type of witness he deserves and the type of testimony that will genuinely help others to seek to conform themselves to the same Good Shepherd.
• We see two illustrations of this today. First we see it in what happened to Joseph the Patriarch, whose life we’ve been pondering throughout the week. It was through the betrayal of his brothers that he became conformed to God’s plans for the salvation of his family. We see the wickedness of the brothers in having allowed their father to be tortured all of these years not knowing whether Joseph his beloved son had been murdered by animals. They had never repented throughout the years. Beyond that, as we’ll see tomorrow, they will continue to try to lie to their brother for their own sakes. But Joseph, having learned the lessons of God, transcended it. And in his merciful, providential care for his family, he was showing that he bore within, to some degree, the spirit of his Father in heaven.
• We see also see these lessons depicted in the lives of the Chinese martyrs whom the Church celebrates today. These 120 martyrs, St. Augustine Zhao Rong and his 119 companions, are just some of the thousands of martyrs in China from 1648 to 2000. Whenever the Church beatifies or canonizes large groups of martyrs, they always look for one who will be the “lead” name. It’s almost always a native son rather than a missionary (and today we celebrate 87 Chinese — children, parents, catechists or laborers, ranging from nine years of age to 72 and four Chinese diocesan priests — and 33 missionaries to China, priests and women religious, especially from the Order of Preachers, the Paris Foreign Mission Society, the Friars Minor, Jesuits, Salesians and Franciscan Missionaries of Mary) and one who, in a sense, summarizes and synthesizes the beauty of the faith, hope and love of all of them. The “lead” saint for this group had so many candidates, in my opinion. There would have been great fittingness if the Vatican had selected St. Chi Zhuzi, an 18-year-old boy who had been preparing to receive the sacrament of Baptism when he was caught on the road one night and ordered to worship idols. He refused to do so, revealing his belief in Christ. His right arm was cut off and he was tortured, but he would not deny his faith. Rather, he fearlessly pronounced to his captors, before being flayed alive, “Every piece of my flesh, every drop of my blood will tell you that I am Christian.” But the Vatican chose St. Augustine Zhao Rong, who was the first native-born Chinese priest to be martyred. And the story of his ascent to the altars on earth, as a priest and as a saint, is one of the most memorable in hagiography. In 1815, he was a 30-year-old soldier escorting French Missionary Bishop Saint John Gabriel-Taurin Dufresse on an infamous Chinese death march from Chendu to Beijing where he would be martyred. He was so moved by the bishop’s patience, his forgiving those who struck him with blows, whipped him with cords and pushed him to the ground, his prayer and his joy along the death march that after the journey — in other words the way he was like a sheep among wolves and as pure as a dove — he asked what he needed to do to become a Christian. Once baptized, he queried who would be able to celebrate the sacraments for the people after so many missionary priests had been killed. When he realized that people might live and die without the sacraments, he asked to go to the seminary, even though to be a priest was to basically live under a death sentence. He journeyed to Macao, where they gave him an expedited course and, because the few bishops left who could ordain priests could be arrested and killed at any moment, he was ordained right away, intending that he would continue to learn what he needed on the fly. But he was soon himself arrested after he had begun his priestly ministrations, and then tortured and martyred. He had gone from pagan soldier to baptized Christian to priest to martyr within three months, such was the power of Bishop Dufresse’s faith on the death march, which the bishop transformed into the way to the eternal Jerusalem; such was also the love of God that made Bishop Dufresne so courageous, the contagious love that captivated Zhao Rong. And his own conversion and example of love for God inspired many other Chinese people to come to the faith after him. It’s an incredible love story. It’s an extraordinary illustration of Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel.
• Today the Good Shepherd comes to us here in this Chapel not as a Lamb among wolves but as a Savior among those who have received his gift. Rather than being betrayed by family members, he’s here to be embraced, as he hands himself — betrays himself — over to us to strengthen us precisely as he sends us out. It’s here the Holy Spirit hovers over us, reminds us of our filiation in Jesus’ divine filiation and makes us siblings who won’t betray each other or him, but those who will support him and each other, persevering until the end. It’s here that the Father seeks to fill us with the virtues of the Heart of His Son, inflame us with His Love, conform us to his image and give us the fullness of redemption. Let us receive these great gifts today and, like the Chinese martyrs, be fortified to go out fearlessly among wolves with the power of God and seek to draw into this mystery as many sheep as we can and by God’s miraculous power to transform as many wolves as possible, through serpentine wisdom and dovelike purity, into sheep for God’s eternal fold.

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