The Fire of the Love of Christ That Surpasses Knowledge, 29th Thursday (II), October 24, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Thursday of the 29th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Anthony Mary Claret
October 24, 2024
Eph 3:14-21, Ps 33, Lk 12:49-53

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today in the first reading, St. Paul prostrates himself before God the Father in prayer, begging him to sent the fire of the Holy Spirit upon the Christians in Ephesus and upon us to strengthen us in our inner self. He prays that the Holy Spirit will strengthen us in mind, will and conscience so that we might allow Christ to dwell in our hearts, and, rooted in love, to have the courage to understand “the breadth and length and height and depth [of] the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” and “be filled with all the fullness of God.” Several early saints interpreted the breath, length, height and depth as the dimensions of the Cross, which is fundamentally not a sign of pain but of the love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge that bore that pain for love of us. St. Paul was praying to the Father to raise us as his children by the Holy Spirit to be strengthened by the Cross, to allow his crucified and risen Son to abide in us and to help us to understand the cruciform dimensions of the Christian life so as to open ourselves to the fullness of the God of love. It’s an extraordinary prayer, begging for a fullness St. Paul himself had already tasted when he himself admitted he had been crucified with Christ and that the life he was living in the flesh he was living by faith in the Son of God who loved him and died for him, a fullness he called “God’s power and wisdom.”
• In the Gospel, Jesus speaks about the fire he had come to earth to ignite, and links it to “the baptism with which [he] must be baptized,” which is the baptism of blood on the Cross. He said he was in “anguish” until that baptism be accomplished and the fire begin blazing. His love on the Cross is meant to be a fire of love that is meant to light the world ablaze, the type of love that will transform and strengthen us within. It’s a living flame that will eventually unite all people in the love of the Father who sent his Son to form a loving family, but that union will happen only when people allow themselves to be “burned” and “transformed” by Christ’s love. Many are afraid of the fire, afraid of zeal. That’s why Jesus says that he has come not to “bring peace but division,” because he and the fire of his love would be a sign of contradiction dividing even family members; this is not because Christ is a divider, but when someone in a family opts for Christ, others who want to be first get jealous and angry, and that’s what divides. This was true in the early Church. Often when Jews converted to Christianity, they were disowned by their family. Still today when a Muslim converts to Christianity in Pakistan and various other fundamentalist Muslim countries, or a Hindu converts in certain fundamentalist areas in India, a contract is put out on them, and most often by the members of his or her own family. There are those who find the all-consuming fire of Christ’s love a threat and the sinful reaction to others’ coming alive in love does divide. But the love of Christ burning in the family is able to forgive and to heal, so that all members of the family, God-willing, will grow stronger in faith, allow Christ to remain in their home, and come to the celestial home of the Father from whom every family on earth takes its name.
• This fire of love that Christ came to unite features prominently in the new encyclical Pope Francis published this morning entitled Dilexit Nos, about the love of the Sacred Heart for us. He says that Jesus’ heart was filled with the fire of the Holy Spirit. One section he entitles simply “Fire” in which he urges us to heed St. Bonaventure’s counsel, “In the end we should not pray for light, but for ‘raging fire,’ [so that] … the knowledge that Christ died for us does not remain knowledge, but necessarily becomes affection, love.” He said that to build a civilization of love, we need the “fire and the light that radiate from the heart of Christ.” So he encourages us to “welcome the love of Christ in complete trust, and enable its fire to spread in our lives, [so that] we [will] become capable of loving others as Christ did.” That leads inexorably to our Christian mission.” The flames of love of the Sacred Heart of Jesus,” he commented, “expand through the Church’s missionary outreach, which proclaims the message of God’s love revealed in Christ. Saint Vincent de Paul put this nicely when he invited his disciples to pray to the Lord for ‘this spirit, this heart that causes us to go everywhere, this heart of the Son of God, the heart of our Lord, that disposes us to go as he went… he sends us, like [the apostles], to bring fire everywhere.'”
• Someone who lived with this fire and sought to “bring fire everywhere” is the saint the Church remembers today. St. Anthony Mary Claret was born in Catalunia in 1807. I once happened upon his birthplace walking in the Spanish Pyrenees back in 1993. I prayed at the Church he was baptized in Sallent and pondered, a month before I entered seminary, the meaning of his life and my life and the call to sanctity given in baptism. I’ve always felt a close connection to him since. He was so passionate about spreading the faith, helping others to pray and receive the Lord’s superabundant mercy that he was named a missionary Archbishop of Santiago in Cuba, where he worked tireless to help the Cubans grow in faith. He founded the Missionary Sons of the Immaculate to help him in this work and into which he sought to pour the fire of God’s love and the gifts of the Holy Spirit so that they could bring that fire everywhere. Many of them brought it burning to martyrdom. So many bold Claretian seminarians gave their life for God and for their brothers and sisters during the Spanish civil war that they have been dubbed the “Martyrial Congregation.” St. Anthony was recalled to Spain by the Queen to be her chaplain and he used his office, through the office of the queen, to do a tremendous amount of good in bringing the love of God to the court, where he sought to eliminate silly and suggestive talk, immorality, impurity and greed. Wherever he went he sought to pass on to others the fire of divine love that burned within, of the breadth, length, height and depth of the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.
• We receive Christ’s holy fire each Mass, as Christ seeks to make our hearts burn and, as St. Ephrem used to proclaim in the early Church, when we consume the host we’re consuming “Fire.” In the Eucharist, we enter into Christ’s passion, and Christ seeks to strengthen us, and comes to remain in us, so that we may experience in this world a little of the fullness with which he wishes to fill us forever. And it’s through this communion that St. Paul’s prayer that God the Father through his Spirit strengthen us in our inner self is answered.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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