Spiritual Paternity and Maternity, 21st Wednesday in Ordinary Time (I), August 28, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 21st Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
August 28, 2019
Memorial of St. Augustine, Bishop and Doctor
1 Thess 2:9-13, Ps 139, Mt 23:27-32

To listen to an audio of this homily, please click: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today St. Paul retraces how he sought to treat the new Christians in Thessalonika with parental love. Yesterday he told them “We were gentle among you, as a nursing mother cares for her children” and went on to show how that mother-like affection led him to share with them “not only the Gospel of God, but our very selves as well, so dearly beloved had you become to us.” Like a mother who breastfeeds her child, giving her own self together with the nourishment, so St. Paul was describing how he was giving himself to the Thessolonian Christians together with the Gospel. Today he mentions a type of paternal inspiration moving children past their fears and excuses: “We treated each one of you as a father treats his children, exhorting and encouraging you and insisting that you walk in a manner worthy of the God who calls you into his Kingdom and glory.” We can learn so much from each of these images about how to be spiritual mothers and fathers of others. God, as we know, loves us with both paternal and maternal love. His paternal love is expressed by the masculine word in Hebrew hesed, which points to how loyal and unwavering his merciful love is. His maternal love is conveyed by the word rahamim, which is tender and can never forget a child (Is 49). It’s from God’s love that the Church — and each of us in the Church — learns how to love as both mother and father, giving ourselves in love together with God’s word, much like mothers put their whole lives into their care for their children, and challenging kids to live up to their potential, much like fathers help children leave comfort zones and confront and overcome obstacles.
• With parental pride, St. Paul gives thanks to God for the way that the Thessalonians had received both the Gospel and Paul’s own self-gift as means to walk — behave— in a way consistent with the kingdom to which God calls. “For this reason we too give thanks to God unceasingly, that, in receiving the word of God from hearing us, you received it not as the word of men, but as it truly is, the word of God, which is now at work in you who believe.” They received the Word as a gift from God himself and allowed that word to change their life, to work within, to bear fruit from good soil, to separate their bone from their marrow. The Word of God is meant to impact their life and change it and they were allowing that metanoia, that revolution of the way they live, to happen as a result of the word of God.
• This was in huge contrast to the Scribes and Pharisees whom Jesus calls to conversion in today’s Gospel. After the exile in Babylon, as a result of the Jews’ failure to hear and heed the Word of God, the Scribes were formed to study meticulously every letter of the Mosaic law and Sacred Scripture to prevent a recurrence of the exile due to ignorance and infidelity. The Pharisees were ones whose whole life revolved around putting into practice what the scribes themselves taught. Many scribes were Pharisees and vice versa. But lots of them, instead of being set free by the truth of God’s word, allowed it to become a means to enslave them. They started to draw huge human interpretations around God’s word — like hand washing, or the way to live the Sabbath — that began to strain out gnats and swallow camels, that had them ignore the weightier parts of the law for the sake of the less important material. In the 23rd Chapter of St. Matthew, Jesus pronounces seven “woes” to call them to conversion, to allow the word of God to save them and give them life. He knew that their pride in thinking they were experts in the Word of God hardened the ears of their hearts to the conversion the Word made flesh was asking, made them impervious to the power of the Word of God in those who believe, and so he used brutal images, images that were nevertheless true about the state of their approach to God and his word enfleshed in Jesus. Real love shows occasionally itself in such righteous anger, just like fathers and mothers, teachers and coaches, need to be very stern with those they love and are calling higher and better. Jesus calls them hypocrites — actors — who say they live the word but don’t really. They’re like whitewashed tombs, full of death and filth, rather than God. They mark the tombs of the prophets but were conspiring right then — with archenemies the law Sadducees and Herodians — to execute Jesus, to whom all the prophets pointed. They were pretending to be holy while at the same time plotting to do something that would become the worst sin of all time.
• It’s important for us today to ask ourselves to what extent we receive the Word of God as it really is and allow that word to work in us. Sometimes those who are close to the Word of God, who hear it every day, who get into the routine of good religious habits, can became harder soil, thinking we already “know” what we need, even though Christianity isn’t an intellectual exam but a way of life. The key is always whether we incarnate God’s word, whether we bear fruit from what he has revealed to us. The model for this is our Lady, who heard the Word as a Word to be done, who replied, Let it be done to me according to your word,” who let the Word transform her and treasured and pondered it so much within that she was able to make Hannah’s song and the psalms totally her own in the Magnificat. The Word of God that we listen to is powerful. It created the universe. It calmed stormy seas. It raised the dead, cured lepers, cast out demons. It changes bread and wine into God on the altar. It forgives us even our worst sins and makes formerly whitewashed tombs places of resurrection and life.
• Someone who allowed the power of God’s word to change his life so that he in turn could become a great spiritual father of others is St. Augustine. His conversion happened when he was 32. One day as he was weeping over his state in the back yard of a friend, he heard what sounded like kids singing from a neighboring yard saying, “Tolle et legge,” “Take and read.” He thought it was a strange game for kids to play, but finding no kids, he thought it was a message perhaps from an angel. So he took up the Sacred Scriptures and began to read what his eyes found first. It was a passage from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans which served as a spiritual alarm clock for him:  “It is the hour now for you to awake from sleep. For our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed;  the night is advanced, the day is at hand. Let us then throw off the works of darkness [and] put on the armor of light; let us conduct ourselves properly as in the day, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in promiscuity and licentiousness, not in rivalry and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the desires of the flesh” (Rom 13:11-14).  That passage seemed like it was written precisely for him — as it indeed it was, for him and for us! — and it gave him the courage from God finally to leave the long night of spiritual sleep and the darkness of the flesh behind and live with the Lord in the day. He received that word “not as the word of men, but as it truly is, the word of God,” and it went to work in him through faith and his interiorization of God’s word was so great that he became one of the greatest commentators of it, in word and witness, in the history of the Church.
• Later in life, in one of the most beautiful passages in the history of the saints, he grasped that the Word of God had surrounded him but he had been as oblivious to its power as many of the scribes and Pharisees were. He wrote in his Confessions, “Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would not have been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.” God wishes to break through the deafness of us all.
• But that was only the first stage of his conversion, which helped me grasp the meaning of being a son of God. The second stage was when he was explicitly called to be a spiritual father, to serve others by feeding them with the Gospel and his very self. When he had returned to Africa after his mother’s death, he had founded a monastery for which he wrote the rule and where he began to write some of his great theological works. It was a perfect situation for him, it seemed, and he was cranking. One day when he had gone to visit a friend in the small city of Hippo, he was attending Mass and the elderly bishop asked the people to pray that the Lord would send him someone who could help him with his preaching duties in Latin, because he had become too infirm to preach. The people looked around and saw in the crowd Augustine, once the greatest rhetoric professor in the empire and now a monk, and proposed him. Augustine didn’t want to have anything to do with that work, which would require giving up a lot of his writing in order to care for ordinary people with ordinary concerns. But he sensed that it was the Lord calling him to be humble and, like the Lord, begin to live for others. “Christ died for all,” he read in St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, “so that those who live should not live for themselves, but for him who died for them” (2 Cor 5:15). And so he made the great sacrifice, being ordained a deacon and a priest and eventually, after the bishop’s death, bishop and successor. And it was from that point that he took on the paternal and maternal love of God as he loved God’s people.
• Today as we pray this Mass on his feast day, we have heard the Word of God and he is praying for us to receive it fruitfully, as it really is, and allow it to go to work. He wants us to grasp that Beauty ever ancient, ever new, is here with us, calling, shouting, breaking through deafness, flashing, shining, dispelling blindness, breathing his fragrance on us, touching us, and stoking our hunger to taste him. Let us receive the Word made flesh as it really is and allow him to help us to walk in a matter worthy of the God who calls us into his Kingdom and glory.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Reading 1
1 THES 2:9-13