Stirring into Flame the Gift of God, 9th Wednesday (II), June 3, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the Ninth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Charles Lwanga and Companions, Martyrs
June 3, 2020
2 Tim 1:1-3.6-12, Ps 123, Mk 12:18-27

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• At times like now, with the coronavirus pandemic and demonic destruction and looking in our major cities, all of us need to be buttressed with the gift of courage. Today’s martyrs, St. Charles Lwanga and his companions, are great examples for us all. That courage comes from the Holy Spirit. It is conditioned by a firm faith in God and in a belief in eternal life, that even should we have to suffer and die, that will not be the end but the beginning. Today’s readings and feast help us to enter more deeply into these truths and be strengthened to live as salt, light and leaven at a time in which Christians are needed to shine with full Christian splendor.
• Today in the Gospel, Jesus speaks about the reality of eternal life with him, fortifying our faith in eternity. In anticipation of Jesus’ imminent passion, those conspiring to have Jesus murdered continue to try to interrogate him in the temple area to undermine his authority and catch him in his speech so that they might undermine his authority or find a pretext to have him dispatched. After yesterday’s question about paying taxes to Caesar, today’s question comes from the Sadducees, who didn’t believe in the Resurrection. They based their theology only on the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, and claimed that the Pentateuch didn’t say anything about the Resurrection. They present the situation of a woman married to seven brothers consecutively as part of the Levirate custom of the Jews, something that seemed to correspond a little bit to the situation of Sarah in the Book of Tobit. Because the woman in their hypothetical had become “one flesh” (Genesis) with seven different men, they queried, to which of the seven husbands’ bodies would she be one flesh in the afterlife, after the Resurrection of the Body? It was absurd to them that she would be one flesh with seven different brothers simultaneously, because that would imply they would be one flesh with each other. Jesus’ answer was that they knew neither the Scriptures nor the power of God. If they were expert even the Pentateuch they claimed to believe, they would know from God’s appearing to Moses in the burning bush, that God “is” — not was — the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, that he is the God of the living, and that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, though long dead on earth, are somehow alive. The second thing Jesus mentioned is the “power of God.” Jesus was implying that the Sadducees didn’t believe God had the power to raise the dead. God had in fact manifested that eternally-life-giving power in the lives of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and would obviously do so again in Jesus’ resurrection of the body. The biggest upshot of the passage is about eternal life. Jesus engaged the question — unlike the question about his authority, or the question of taxes to Caesar — because of the importance of eternal life, which he came to reveal and make happen. He described the reality of heaven as a place where there is no marriage or giving in marriage, because there’s one marriage, the wedding feast of the Lamb and his Bride. The purpose of marriage is the sanctification of the spouses and the generation and education of children, and in heaven the spouses would be already saints and there would be no children born from their union. But while there will be no human marriage in heaven, the love of spouses remains.
• St. Paul was someone who knew the Scriptures and the power of God. He was one whose sights were on the things that are above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. He would teach that if Christ hadn’t been raised, and if there is no resurrection from the dead, all our faith is in vain. And he sought to have Timothy know that power. He encouraged Timothy to let his faith be stirred into a flame and live “not with a spirit of cowardice but rather of love and power and self-control.” That’s the power of God, the power that could make one courageous like Paul: he said that he wasn’t afraid of his many sufferings for the Gospel because “I know in whom I have believed and am confident that he is able to guard what has been entrusted to me until that day,” the day that will know no end, the day of the “appearance of our Savior Christ Jesus who destroyed death and brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel.” He knew Sacred Scripture and God’s power. He had allowed his faith to be stirred into a flame by the Holy Spirit and that filled him with a spirit of courage, power, love and self-mastery, and he was confident that the one in whom he believed, Jesus himself, would guard him all his days and bring him to life and immorality through his living and dying for the Gospel. And he wanted St. Timothy to have the same gift, so that our faith — about heaven, about the God of the living not of the dead, about eternal life, about God’s power and wisdom — become a bonfire capable of lighting the world ablaze.
• Today the Church celebrates the feast of those whose faith was stirred into a flame from their youth, who knew and believed in what God had revealed in the Scriptures and trusted in his power over death. These 22 Ugandan martyrs all died between the ages of 14 to 25, from a few days to a few years from the time the flame of faith was first ignited in them by conversion and baptism. Their story, as Saint Paul VI said at their canonization in 1964, is every bit as moving as that of the heroic martyrs of the early Church, because they were martyrs soon after having becoming Christians. When the White Fathers arrived in Buganda, the southern part of what is now Uganda, in 1879, they found the local King Mtesa hospitable to outside influence in the hope of improving his personal and national situation. Mtesa had already welcomed in Anglican missionaries a few years earlier. Because he liked the Christian teaching on the afterlife, he even allowed the missionaries to evangelize the members of his court. One of his young pages was Mukasa Balikuddembe, who rose in prominence at the palace after he courageously saved Prince Mwanga’s life by capturing and killing with his bare hands a venomous snake threatening him. For 3 years, Mkasa received a very thorough catechumenate at the palace from the White Fathers before being baptized in 1882 with the name of Joseph. After the White Fathers needed to go into exile for a couple of years because the dying king feared outside influences, Joseph Mkasa became the de facto catechist for the converts and hundreds of catechumens. When the priests returned after Mtesa’s death in 1884, they saw that Joseph Mkasa had helped the new converts bring family members to the Lord, renounce slavery, polygamy and other practices against the Gospel, and dedicate themselves heroically to serving those in need. Once Prince Mwanga had succeeded his father, Joseph Mkasa became his majordomo, the top assistant in charge of the king’s palace and court. To be head of the pages, Joseph appointed a young catechumen, Lwanga. What both men soon discovered, however, was that King Mwanga was homosexually-attracted to the teenage boys and solicitous to have them brought into his private company. Through various means, Joseph and Lwanga successfully and repeatedly conspired to thwart the king’s designs, but the king grew increasingly frustrated. After King Mwanga had had an Anglican missionary bishop murdered, Joseph went into his presence and reproved him for the murder as well as for his perverse attraction to the boys in his service. Even though it was technically the majordomo’s traditional responsibility to correct the king, Mwanga would have nothing of it. His anger boiled against Joseph and his fellow Christians whom he knew were training the boys to resist his advances. Under the pretext of Joseph’s disloyalty for putting the commands of another king, “The God of the Christians,” over his own, King Mwanga sentenced him to be burned alive. To the executioner who was having trouble carrying out his orders against the majordomo, Joseph said, “A Christian who gives his life for God has no reason to fear death. Tell Mwanga that he has condemned me unjustly, but I forgive him with all my heart.” After that, the executioner took it upon himself to behead Joseph and burn his body rather than have him burned alive. The day of Joseph’s martyrdom, Lwanga and the other catechumens among the pages were baptized. King Mwanga had made it known that he was intending to put to death all the Christians in his court and they wanted to make sure that they were baptized by water and the Holy Spirit before they were baptized in blood. Lwanga took the Christian name Charles. Several months later, after the king returned from a fishing trip and saw one of the routine objects of his sordid desire receiving catechetical instruction, he summoned the catechist, St. Denis Ssebuggwawo, put a spear through his chest and then had his executioners hack him to pieces. The following day, the king, fuming, assembled all the pages and demanded that they make a choice, between God and him, between prayer and the predator, between life and death. “Let all those who do not pray stay here by my side,” he said, waving to his right, and “those who pray” he told to stand by the fence at his left. Charles Lwanga and a group of 26 Christian pages, 16 Catholics and 10 Anglicans, headed toward the fence. He asked them whether they intended to remain Christians. “Until death!,” they replied. “Then put them to death!,” Mwanga responded, sentencing them to be burnt alive in Namugongo, a village 37 miles away. They began the death march, which they turned into a religious procession with hymns, prayers and expressions of joy. This was in the sharpest contracted to the brutality of their “chaperones,” who beat them so fiercely that three of them died along the way. Once in Namugongo, they were forced to watch for days as the pyre awaiting them grew and became increasingly intense. The executioners decided to kill Charles Lwanga first, in the hope that after his death, others might abandon the faith. To increase his sufferings, he was placed in a reed mat and fire was set first to his feet first so that these would be charred to the bone before the flames would reach the other parts of his body. In the midst of his suffering, Charles said to his executioner, “You are burning me, but it is as if you are pouring water over my body,” a reference to the sweet solace of his baptism, the foretaste of his imminent new birth. After he was dead, the others remained steadfast and entered the pyre. One young page said to a priest present who was mourning the death of so many young Christians, “Why be sad? What I suffer now is little compared with the eternal happiness you have taught me to look forward to!” They died on June 3, which was fittingly Ascension Thursday. It’s no surprise that, on the foundation of their heroic faith, the Church has continued to grow in Uganda. Even though Christianity was less than a decade old in their kingdom, they had already gotten what it was about, and they were willing to die rather than to sin, to be killed rather than to allow sinful predation to happen to the young and innocent, to be burned alive rather than to betray the faith in the least in order to keep their lives. This was the work of the Holy Spirit in them, stirring into a flame the gift of God and helping them grow in their trust in God’s saving power.
• The Lord wants to work a similar transformation in us that took place in Paul, Timothy, Joseph, Charles, Denis, and their companions. The place where this transformation begins is here at Mass, where we meet the God who spoke in the burning bush, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of Peter, James and John, the God of Mary, Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany, the God of Paul, Timothy, the Ugandan martyrs. It’s here that, as St. Ephrem the Deacon wrote in Syria in the fourth century, we “consume fire.” The greater the wood we bring the more God’s fire can do it’s thing. That flame can burn away the dead wood within us and help us to come fully alive. And when we begin to burn with that life, when we’re dead to worldly things and set our hearts on the things above, then not even the threat of death can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. So we come to the Lord today, the Lord who came into this world to light a fire on earth and longed for it to be kindled, and beg him to enkindle, to stir within us, the fire of his love so that through us he can renew the face of our society and of the whole earth.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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