The Crown of Righteousness That Awaits Those Who Faithfully Fight, Run, Pray and Long For God, 30th Sunday (C), October 23, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
October 23, 2022
Sir 35:12-14.16-18, Ps 34, 2 Tim 4:6-8.16-18, Lk 18:9-14

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• One of the classic practices when one goes on a retreat is to meditate about one’s death. Since we never know the day or the hour when Christ will come for us, and pondering the end of our life helps us better to learn how to live, to focus on what really matters in life, to prioritize what’s truly important, and to order our choices wisely. As helpful as that practice is, there’s an even more useful one: it’s to enter into the holy thoughts and prudent preparations of the saints as they prepare for death. Today, in the second reading, we are given the privilege to read what is essentially St. Paul’s last will and testament. He was in a Roman prison, preparing for execution and writing what he thought might be his final words to his spiritual son St. Timothy. He said he was already being poured out as a sacred sacrificial offering to God — as the Romans used to finish their sacrifices by pouring wine on the ground to the pagan gods — and that the time of his departure from this life was near. In one phrase, one of the most powerful and memorable lines in Sacred Scripture and human history, he summarized all he sought to do in his life since his conversion outside the gates of Damascus. He wrote. “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” As we think of our life and the time of our eventual departure from it, St. Paul would be urging us, like he urged the young St. Timothy, to make these three things our priorities, so that we might echo them throughout our life and at the hour of our death.
• The first thing he says is, “I have fought the good fight.” He points to the truth that the Christian life isn’t easy. It isn’t supposed to be. It’s a battle. The word he uses for fight is the Greek word for agony. He says he’s agonized through the “good and beautiful agony.” St. Paul heroically and agonizingly battled through multiple imprisonments, beatings, stonings, shipwrecks, labors, sleepless nights, hunger and thirst, anxiety for the Churches, betrayals, abandonments and more (2 Cor 11:23-28). But he never gave up the fight. He competed like a champion. And he wanted to help strengthen St. Timothy. He was indicating that in the Christian life, we have to struggle against our weaknesses and failings, we need to war against the devil, principalities and powers and unending infernal attempts to turn us from God, against the temptations, obstacles and difficulties others and human life in general can place in our way to make it harder to live and share our faith. Despite all the punches that he took in life, St. Paul told St. Timothy in today’s passage, “The Lord stood by me and gave me strength.” The same Lord will stand by us. That’s why St. Paul could write to St. Timothy at the end of his first letter, “Fight the good fight of faith” (1 Cor 12:6). The Christian life is meant to train us to be fighters, to be strong and resilient, to be heroic like Jesus, like Paul, like the martyrs young and old throughout the centuries, because we recognize that God is standing by us to give us strength and that we can do all things in him who strengthens us (Phil 4:13). St. Paul wants St. Timothy and each of us to be as stout in the spiritual life as the top boxers and MMA fighters are in the ring. And we’re living at a time in which that strength is ever needed.
• The second thing St. Paul declares is, “I have finished the race.” One of the reasons why St. Paul was able to do so much for the Lord was because he always had a sense of urgency. He recognized that the Christian life is not one where we sleep until noon, spend the day leisurely, and take as many naps as we wish. The Christian life isn’t a lackadaisacal saunter following in Jesus’ footsteps with plenty of time for diversions and no urgency to prioritize the things of God. Rather, the Christian life is a race! It’s a life-long marathon. St. Paul sped all over the ancient world, throughout the Middle East, Asia and parts of southern Europe. While most of us are not called to anywhere near the same total on the pedometer as he amassed, we are called to live our faith with similar tenacity, priority and promptness. We’re called to hasten to God, to hasten to serve others, to hasten to grow in and share our faith. Just as he said and showed caritas Christi urget nos (2 Cor 5:14), the love of Christ and of others is meant to motivate us to persevere in the marathon of Christian life, up hills and down into valleys. The same Lord who gave St. Paul spiritual stamina will sustain us, because he’s running the race right alongside of us to the heavenly Jerusalem.
• The third thing St. Paul states is the most important: “I have kept the faith.” This expression means far more than that the apostle was rejoicing that he hadn’t in the end become a heretic or an atheist. Rather, he looked upon his greatest triumph as keeping the faith that he regarded as the greatest gift of his life. He had remained faithful. He had stayed true to the Lord. St. Paul preserved the faith by sharing it. He wrote to the Corinthians, “For I handed on to you as of first importance what I myself received” (1 Cor 15:3). In  today’s passage, he told St. Timothy that his goal was that through him “the proclamation might be completed and all the Gentiles might hear it.” Pope Francis commented a few years ago on this connection between keeping the faith and sharing it with others. He asked, “How did St. Paul preserve the faith?” and replied, “Not in a safe! He didn’t hide it underground, like the lazy servant who buried the talent. … He kept the faith because he didn’t limit himself to defending it, but proclaimed it, spread it, brought it to the farthest reaches of the world. … He preserved the faith because, just as he received it, he passed it on, throwing himself into the peripheries without hiding behind bunkers.” Pope Francis urged us likewise not to try to keep our faith like a private possession, but to share it with words and witness. This will happen, he said, if we recognize how great a treasure the faith and seek to share that treasure with those we know and love. To keep the faith through having given his life to spread it was St. Paul’s greatest boast. He wants it to be ours, so that at the end of our life, we can look back with similar joy.
• To fight the good fight, to finish the race and to keep the faith are three lenses with which we could look at all aspects of our Christian life. In today’s Gospel, however, Jesus speaks to us once again about prayer, and so it’s important for us to re-read the Gospel in the light of St. Paul’s words and re-read St. Paul’s last will and testament in light of Jesus’ instructions on prayer. We know that prayer is a battle. The Catechism tells us that sometimes prayer is like Jacob’s struggle all night against the angel of God (Gen 32:25-32). We’re called to fight the good fight of prayer, to never stop running to God in prayer and to persevere in that marathon of a praying always without growing weary, as Jesus taught us all last Sunday in the Parable of the Persistent Widow. And if we’re going to keep the faith, we need to preserve a life of intense prayer, since, as Pope Benedict never ceased to say, prayer is faith-in-action. So today let’s learn from what the Lord teaches us in the Gospel about how to pray well so that we may be strengthened by him who stands with us to fight, to run, and to stay faithful.
• In preparation for Jesus’ teaching in the Gospel, the Church gives us the first reading and the Psalm. Sirach reminds us that God doesn’t play favorites. He’s not “unduly partial to the weak” or the strong, “yet he hears the cry of the oppressed, … the orphan, …the widow, … the lowly, … the one who serves God willingly.” The Psalm reminds us, “When the just cry out, the Lord hears them,” for he is “close to the brokenhearted,” those “crushed in spirit,” those who “take refuge in him” and the “poor.” Yet while God hears the prayers of everyone and seeks to respond, in order to receive his gives, each of us needs to know that we need those gifts and be open to them. Our prayer, in other words, must be humble, since pride can and will close us off to what God seeks to give. The surest way to lose the good fight, to quit the race and squander the faith is through pride. We see that in the parable Jesus gives us about the two men who went up to the temple to pray.
• The first man was a Pharisee. He prayed, “Thank you, God, that I am not like the rest of humanity — greedy, dishonest, adulterous — or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, and I pay tithes on my whole income.” The man was what most people would deem a highly religious man. He was going up to Jerusalem to the temple to pray, rather than just praying wherever he found convenient. He, like his fellow Pharisees, never sought to do the minimum in the practice of the faith but as much as they could. Whereas Jews were required to fast only once a year on the Day of Atonement, the Pharisees fasted twice a week, every Monday and Thursday. Whereas Jews needed to tithe only certain items, he tithed his whole income. While outwardly he was a role model, there was something drastically wrong in his conception of God, of faith, and of others. The first clue is that Jesus said about him, “He spoke this prayer to himself.” This doesn’t mean that he simply said his prayers quietly so that no one else could hear, but, in a sense, he was directing the prayer not to God to himself, as if he were God. Essentially he was more informing God of his goodness rather than turning to God with praise, thanks, contrition, intercession and petition. He rejoiced that he was not like so many others, whom he deemed sinners and losers, exulting in what he saw was his virtue, while failing to recognize that he was proud, judgmental, vain, boastful and uncharitable. He didn’t ask God for mercy because he didn’t think he needed it. In fact, he didn’t ask God for anything, because he didn’t think he needed anything or even God. Compared to so many around him, and to the other person he saw praying at that time in the temple, he considered himself a saint among sinners. He had come to the temple not to worship or beseech God, but essentially to allow God to applaud him.
• Jesus contrasts the Pharisee’s prayer with that of a tax collector. Tax collectors or publicans were hated by their fellow Jews not just because they were collaborating with the Romans who were subjugating the Jewish people, but because in carrying out their duty, they would routinely rip off their people for greed. They were assessed a certain amount that needed to be collected in a particular area; whatever they could get beyond that was theirs to keep — and many of the tax collectors were swindling the poor precisely in order to support a lavish lifestyle. They were corrupt, similar to an ancient mafia class that the authorities with whom they were conspiring would do nothing to stop. One would think that someone who had given his life over to this type of betrayal of his nation and his people wouldn’t pray at all. For him to pray, some might have argued, was hypocritical. But he realized that even if others would never forgive him, God might, and he knew he needed God’s forgiveness. With no arrogance, no self-importance, and great humility, he stayed in the back of the temple, beat his breast and cried, “O God, be merciful to me a sinner.” In fact, the Greek St. Luke uses is even clearer. He prayed, “O God, be merciful to me the ” He considered himself the worst and only sinner around. He didn’t try to exalt himself against anyone but to think of all people he was most desperate for God’s mercy. He was conscious that he didn’t deserve it, but since he knew that the Lord was kind and merciful, that the Lord’s mercy endures forever, with great repentance he prayed for that gift.
• Jesus gave a startling conclusion to the parable. He told his listeners that of the two, the good man who fasted, tithed and lived outwardly by the mosaic law, and the despicable one who conspired with pagan authorities and shook down his own fellow Jews, only one of them had their prayer heard and left the temple in a right relationship with God — and it was the publican! We’ve heard the parable so many times that we can miss the absolute shock that Jesus’ first listeners would have had in response to it. To understand their surprise, it would as if Jesus substituted a pope for the Pharisee and a drug lord for the tax collector and said that when the two left St. Peter’s Basilica only the drug lord was justified, on good terms with God. Such a comment was obviously not about the type of life the Pharisee and publican were leading until then, but about the type of prayer they made. The take-away is that no matter what type of life we have been leading until now, we are called to pray well, which means to pray humbly with a deep recognition of our need for God and for his mercy. This parable points to what Jesus taught elsewhere, “I have come not to call the self-righteous, but sinners!” We have come here on this Lord’s day to pray. If we wish to leave on good terms with the Lord, we must humbly recognize how much we need God, how we’re sinners in need of his mercy and seek to live by it. Only those who pray for mercy, who open themselves to it, will be able to receive it. Only the truly humble will be exalted because they’re the only one who will allow the Lord to lift them up.
• Jesus told the parable, St. Luke tells us, to “those who were convinced of their own righteousness and despised everyone else.” Pride not only separates us from God and his assistance, but also from others. We begin to look down on others, including, for the Pharisee, not just on tax collectors but even on other Pharisees and as we see throughout the Gospel on Jesus himself. Such self-righteousness remains a great problem today. There are some in the Church who, when they look at themselves in the mirror, deem that, even though they may have their weaknesses and problems, at least they’re not like those who have “really sinned.” They might admit that, sure, like “everyone,” they, too, have some little “peccadilloes,” they need perhaps a pinch of God’s mercy, but nothing near what others need. They don’t think, as we pray at the beginning of every Mass, that they have “greatly sinned” by their own “most grievous fault.” Jesus gives this parable as a wake-up call, because such an attitude can incapacitate not only our prayer but our perseverance in the life of faith.
• Such self-righteousness, however, isn’t just a problem for those who, like the Pharisees, actually try to live religiously. It can also afflict those who live like the publican, something that’s popular today in our culture and even in some places in the Church. Those who are clearly violating the Lord’s commandments left and right — by engaging in lifestyles totally incompatible with the Gospel, never coming to the temple to worship God, never praying at all, and advocating things diametrically opposed to what God has revealed — rather than repenting and coming to ask for God’s forgiveness, sometimes can glory in the shame of their sins and attack the Church or anyone seeking to help them to convert. They can pray like this, “I thank you, Lord, because I am not one of those hypocritical and judgmental modern Pharisees, haters who worry about fasting, who are obsessed about coming to Church and praying, who are guilt-tripped into tithing, who are neurotic about sin and think that everyone needs confession, but who in real life are much worse than I am!” Jesus is proclaiming today’s Parable to everyone who is convinced of his or her own righteousness, whether the person has been religiously observant up until now or not. He is teaching us all about the importance of humility before him, in prayer and in life.
• Paul’s used to kill Christians for a living, but he converted. Even after he became a great apostle, he always openly confessed that he was worst and least of all, because he had persecuted God’s Church (1 Cor 15:9). He discovered, however, that God was rich in mercy, so rich in fact that he called Paul himself to be an ambassador of that mercy, to help people throughout the known world to be reconciled to God. At the end of his life, St. Paul was able to pray with humble gratitude to God that he had fought the good fight, finished the race and kept the faith.
• As we enter through the Mass into Jesus’ last will and testament, as he is poured out like a libation for the forgiveness of sins, as we participate in his beautiful good agony and the race he hastened to fulfill at the end of the Via Crucis, we ask for the grace to imitate Jesus and St. Paul in humbly fighting the good combat of the faith until the end, completing the course, treasuring, keeping and spreading the faith, and persevering in prayer to the one who stands by to strengthen us. That is the way by which, like St. Paul, at the end of our life, we will be able to look back with humble gratitude, joy, fulfillment and peace. This is the path by which we will receive the crown of righteousness that awaits us as we long for Christ’s appearance not just at the finish line of life in the heavenly Jerusalem but and even now here on the altar.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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