The Fundamentals of Living in the Kingdom, 1st Monday (II), January 13, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the First Week of Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Hilary of Poitiers, Bishop and Doctor
January 13, 2020
1 Sam 1:1-8, Ps 116: Mk 1:14-20

To listen to an audio recording of the homily, please click here: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today as we begin Ordinary Time in the Church, which will continue through Ash Wednesday on February 26, Jesus gives us the coordinates with which we should be living ordinarily in this and every time. It’s the words and actions with which he began his public ministry. Yesterday we celebrated the Feast of his Baptism, which marked the end of the Christmas season, in which we pondered anew the reality that God had come into our world as a little baby and according to his humanity grew, learned, worked and experienced all aspects of human life except sin. After the revelation of God the Father and God the Holy Spirit in his Baptism, we know that the Holy Spirit led him into the desert for 40 days. Once he left, he began to preach as we hear today. He started by describing that the long wait is over, that we had entered the time of the fulfillment of all man’s hopes and all the Messianic predictions of the prophets because “the kingdom of God is at hand” with the coming of the King, with the advent of God-in-the-flesh. Then this Word who summarizes in himself all God wants to say gives us four verbs, four commands, four things we need to do: repent, believe, follow him, and fish. Today we consider those imperatives and begin ordinary time by seeking to take each of them more seriously than we have until now.
• The first word is “repent.” In Greek, this word is metanoete, which means a total revolution of our mind, of the way we look at things. It’s a call to conversion, to no longer think as everyone else thinks, to no longer do as everyone else does, but to put on the mind of God, to align our heart and our actions to him. It means to recognize we’re not yet living enough as the image and likeness of God, we’re not yet “turning with” Jesus (con-verting) in all aspects and we need to change. In today’s first reading, we see that it’s not enough just to be around the things of the Lord, but to be in his kingdom externally but not interiorly. Penninah, the fertile wife of Elkanah, used to mock Hannah because she was sterile. She used to mock her particularly when Elkanah’s whole family would go up to pray and sacrifice to God at the Temple in Shiloh, which shows that God’s house, rather than bringing out the best in people can bring out the worst when one isn’t really centered on pleasing God. As we’ll hear this week, God in his mercy had a much bigger plan in mind for Hannah, who will become the mother of the great prophet Samuel. Jesus would say in the Sermon on the Mount that in his kingdom those who weep like Hannah will be consoled, and Hannah will be consoled far more than she would have ever dreamed, not just becoming a mom but the mother of one of God’s most famous servants. Not only did Penninah need a conversion, however, but Hannah also needed to have a revolution of mind in terms of the way she approached this situation, she needed to trust in God and act on that trust. Ordinary Time is a time in which we repeatedly repent, in which we continuously convert, in which we incessantly seek to change to become more and more like the Lord who calls us to that penance and renewal. We have to overcome the spiritual stubbornness that makes us hardened soil to the Lord. The Lord who calls us to this metanoia will give us all the help he knows we need to achieve it, but we have to correspond.
• The second word is “believe.” To believe means not just to accept something as true, whether reluctantly or enthusiastically. To believe means totally to submit oneself to a reality on the basis of a trust in the one testifying to the reality. To believe means to entrust ourselves fully to Jesus and on the basis of that trust to ground our lives on what he says. The ordinary time of a Christian is meant to be filled with this type of faith. Because of our trust in Jesus we believe in what he reveals to us about God the Father and we ground our existence on that Father’s love and call. Because of our trust in Jesus we believe in what he tells us about the path of happiness in the Beatitudes and we seek to align our whole lives to what he says. Because of our trust in Jesus we believe in what he says about his presence in the Eucharist, about his sending out the apostles and their successors for the forgiveness of sins in confession, about what he says about caring for others as if we were caring for him, about what he says about praying for our persecutors and even loving our enemies. For the new year that has begun to be truly a year of the Lord, it’s to be a year of faith.
• The third word is “follow me” or “Come after me.” Jesus says those words to Simon Peter, Andrew, James and John in the Gospel and they immediately left their nets, their boats, their fish, their employees and their families to follow him. They were open to the type of revolution in the way they looked at their life that is contained in Jesus’ word metanoete. They believed in Jesus already enough to leave everything behind and base their entire life on his word calling them to follow him and become fishers of men. Likewise for us it’s not enough to repent and to believe, because the Lord Jesus always calls us to follow him in faith, turning back on other things. Ordinary Time is a time of this type of discipleship, in which we focus on following the Lord Jesus.
• And that brings us to the fourth verb: fish. The Lord in calling us to be with him then sends us out. The two great verbs in his vocabulary are “come” and “go.” Once we begin truly to live in his kingdom we begin to share his hunger for everyone to enter.
• Today the Church celebrates someone who when he became aware of what God was asking turned his life around, believed in Jesus and followed him fully. St. Hilary of Poitiers grew up the son of well-educated pagan parents in Gaul (modern day France). He hungered for the meaning of life and knew that the standards of the world didn’t cut it. Most people lived seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, but he said that that is basically the same standard that beasts followed. He searched through various philosophies until he got hold of the Christian Scriptures. He was fascinated by God’s self-description to Moses in the burning bush, “I am who am.” He was even more greatly fascinated by the Christian belief that “I am who am” took on our flesh and entered our world. He recognized that the truth for which he was searching had a proper name, and once he became aware of this, he sought to leave everything and worldly standards behind to follow him. He was a married man and a father and grew in faith as a layman. As soon as he became aware of the Arian heresy and met Arians — those who thought that Jesus was just a great man, but not the eternal Son of God — he started to study all of the Arian writings so that he could help the Arians follow Christ and not the heretical non-divine idol of their making. Eventually when the Diocese of Poitiers became vacant, the people clamored for him to be their leader. He tried to refuse the office, not considering himself up to the task, but those who had chosen him only grew in admiration of his humility. So he assumed the office, even though he would need to be continent with his wife. He was ordained a deacon, priest and bishop. He took time to study, writing, preaching and prayer to combat the heresy, and he did it so effectively that he was banished by the emperor Constantius from France for three years to Phrygia. In Phrygia, however, he didn’t wallow. Instead he prayed and wrote, and those treatises in defense of God’s divinity are still essential for us today. In just 18 years as a bishop, in just 22 years as a Christian, he incredibly became a doctor of the Church. His life was a commentary on how one, living in God’s kingdom, is moved from within with a desire to have others enter it. He taught — and through his hallowed writings, teaches still. He suffered much from political and ecclesiastical figures for his firm writings and preaching against the Arians, but his courage and passionate desire to follow and fish for Christ in everything helped to liberate France over time from this heresy and draw many to the true faith.
• This repentance, faith, following and apostolic fishing are things that are meant to be not one time things or episodic, extraordinary events but ordinary. Jesus speaks to us each day in prayer, calling us to change, challenging us to believe in him, and to follow him as he sends us out to catch others for him. Every day at Mass we have a chance to be renewed in all three aspects. There’s no greater way to repay the Lord for the gift of his kingdom, the gift of his calling, the gift of his commissioning than to do what today’s Psalm says, what we are about to repeat as the Church repeats every day: “How shall I make a return to the LORD for all the good he has done for me? The cup of salvation I will take up, and I will call upon the name of the LORD!” The time of waiting is over. The King and his Kingdom is at hand. Let us turn from whatever keeps us from basing our whole lives on these gifts, believe in what we’re doing, follow Jesus whom we’re about to receive within, and zealously seek to help others with us live ordinary time as God intends.

The readings for today’s Mass were: