The Gift to Lead People to God, 5th Saturday (II), February 15, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Saturday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Claude la Colombière
February 15, 2020
1 Kings 12:26-32.13:33-34, Ps 106, Mk 8:1-10

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• There’s a huge contrast in today’s Mass between those who lead people to God and those who lead people away from God. Christ, the incarnate Son of God, in the Gospel is the eternal high priest leading people to the Father. St. Claude la Colombière, whom the Church celebrates today, like all the saints point us to heaven. The King of Israel, Jeroboam, had on the other hand an infernal genius in drawing souls from God. We have much to learn from all three as to how God wants us to live our life.
• We begin with Jeroboam. Yesterday the Church had us ponder how Jeroboam, whom Solomon had in charge of his labor force, was met by the prophet Ajihah, who tore his new cloak into 12 pieces and told Jeroboam that ten of those pieces, representing the ten tribes of Israel, would be given to him when Solomon’s kingdom would be divided as a result of his fostering of idolatry. He had been chosen by the Lord to rule the ten tribes of the Kingdom of Israel precisely because of Solomon’s idolatry. And yet what do we see him do today? Despite the Lord’s promise, Jeroboam thought to himself, “The kingdom will return to David’s house” if they return to worshipping at the Temple of Jerusalem. They would return not to God, he thought in his politically corrupted musings, but to Rehoboam, David’s grandson and Solomon’s son through an Ammonite wife. And because of his ego and his paranoid sense of self-preservation, Jeroboam led his people into idolatry just like God had condemned Solomon for doing. He said, “If now this people go up to offer sacrifices in the temple of the LORD in Jerusalem, the hearts of this people will return to their master, Rehoboam, king of Judah, and they will kill me.” So he decided to change their deity, their temple, their rites, and their priests. Instead of the one true God who had chosen him, he made golden calves. Instead of the Temple where God’s presence dwelt, he built two shrines, one in Dan at the northernmost part of the kingdom along the Jordan River above the Sea of Galilee, and one in Bethel, at the southernmost part of the kingdom a short distance north of Jerusalem. Instead of the feasts God set up, he established his own. And instead of the levites, the priests God had chosen, he allowed anyone who wanted to be a priest to be commissioned. And the people were led away by him from the true God and the temple, the feasts and the priests God himself had established.
• We might think that this is just a terrible thing that happened 920-930 years before Christ, but what Jeroboam did in drawing people away from God happens in every age. There are many rulers who have sought to suppress worship of the true God in order to advance their political objectives. Think of what happened to the Jews during the time of Antioches Epiphanes IV or the Christians during the 13 ferocious anti-Christian persecutions between 64-313 AD. Think about what happened to the Japanese Christians at the beginning of the 1600s or the Christians in communist countries last century and the Chinese and North Korean governments still today. There have been many Jeroboams over the course of history! But we also need to be aware of the more subtle ways that the same idolatry is promoted among us today. Pope Francis has said repeatedly that we are living now in a new age of the worship of the Golden Calf. Likewise many have substituted worship at the true temple for false worship. So many say that they don’t need to come to worship God in the Holy Eucharist with the other members of his family, but instead they can worship him just as well lying in their hammock in the backyard or in their favorite recliner. One of the newest temples built by our culture’s false worship of mammon and celebrity are sports stadiums, where 75,000 can go on Sunday to worship athletes. I love sports and there’s nothing wrong with being a fan, but we have to admit candidly that many people have turned sports into a new religion. Similarly, there has been a substitution of the true religious rites with different feasts, again for the most part driven by the worship of the golden calf. At Christmas time, many are led to prioritize trees, tinsel, mistletoes, fat white-bearded men and wrapping paper more over the One wrapped in swaddling clothes and placed in a manger. At Easter, many kids are thinking far more about bunnies, chocolate, plastic eggs and jelly beans than they do the Risen Lord Jesus. It’s not that Christmas Trees and Easter Bunnies are necessarily idolatrous — they’re not — but when they substitute for true worship, they’re harmful, and many people have been led astray. And we shouldn’t be surprised that there’s also an attempt to change the priesthood God has established. Jeroboam allowed anyone who wanted to become a priest to become one, as if the vocations came from within and not from God. Today there are many who are trying to change the priesthood, whether we’re talking about married men who want to be ordained, or women who want to be ordained, or even non-Catholics who want to be ordained. At the same time, though, many in our culture have made a different type of priesthood altogether, turning instead to psychiatrists, or to celebrities, or to self-help gurus as the ones with the capacity to lead us to God rather than those sent to us by God. Today as we think about true or implicit Jeroboams, we should think about the larger point about drawing others away from the Lord. There are many who outwardly are ordinary, good people, but who when a family member begins to prioritize God, to put God first, by praying more, or coming to Bible studies, or getting more involved in charitable work, resist, because they get jealous. There are also those who give ordinary scandal leading others away, those who put work ahead of God and show their kids that money is more important to worship, or those who have time for television but not for prayer, or those who teach that we can pick and choose what commandments we want to follow. These are all those who follow in the line of Jeroboam. We need to ask God’s forgiveness for the times we and others have led people away from him by our actions!
• But there’s another path. Jesus shows us in the Gospel today and throughout his life the means by which he seeks to lead people to the true worship of the Father. He shows us God’s compassion and how he seeks to bless us. And he shows that part of his leading us to God is by associating us with God’s work. In the multiplication of the 7 loaves and few fish to feed the crowd of 4,000 — just as in the multiplication of the 5 loaves and 2 fish to feed the crowd of 5,000 — Jesus was teaching us that he wants to incorporate what we have into his compassion on the multitudes. He asks, “How many loaves do you have?” He starts with what we give. We’re called to give him what we have, whether big or small, because he can do so much more with it. Then we see then how he has his disciples pass the food out, incorporating us in distributing his blessings to others. By cooperating with God in this way, we show others how to do the same, which is one of the most important means by which Jesus continues his work through the Church of leading others into the heart of the Trinity.
• One who cooperated fully is the great Jesuit the Church celebrates today, St. Claude la Colombière (1641-1682), most famous for his having been for a short but crucial time the spiritual director of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, to whom Jesus appeared to reveal the mystery of his Sacred Heart. Even though she had been receiving apparitions of Jesus, there was so much she didn’t understand. But God used spiritual direction to lead her to him. St. Margaret Mary said of him,”His gift is to lead souls to God,” and would that that be able to be said about each of us: that we help others to see God and the way God is working in their life. We know what happened with St. Margaret Mary. As she had been receiving apparitions from Jesus, she eventually confided to her superiors and various priests came in to examine here. Some thought she was crazy. Others thought she was possessed. They hurt her quite a bit and their evaluations caused her huge problems in her community. The priest theologians who were in were not properly trained to help her. Finally, God sent her St. Claude, who was able to be Jesus’ instrument to tell her that she wasn’t a freak, that she wasn’t being diabolically played, but that this came from the Lord. And then he helped her fulfill what the Lord was asking of her. Here’s what she wrote in her autobiography: “In the midst of all my fears and difficulties my heart, … I was made to speak to certain theologians, who, far from reassuring me in my way, added still more to my difficulties, until at last Our Lord sent the Rev Father de la Colombiere here. I had already spoken to him in the beginning of my religious life. My Sovereign Master had promised me shortly after I had consecrated myself to Him, that He would send me one of His servants, to whom He wished to make known according to the knowledge He would give me thereof, all the treasures and secrets of His Sacred Heart that He had confided to me. He added that He sent him to reassure me with regard to my interior way, and that He would impart to him signal graces from His Sacred Heart, showering him abundantly over our interviews. When that holy man came and was addressing the community, I interiorly heard these words: ‘This is he whom I send thee.’ I soon realized this in the first confession on the Ember days; for, although we had never either seen or spoken with each other, the Reverend Father kept me a very long time and spoke with me as though he understood what was passing within me. But I would not in anyway open my heart to him just then, and, seeing that I wished to withdraw for fear of inconveniencing the community, he asked me if I would allow him to come and speak with me again in this same place. But in my natural timidity which shrank from all such communications, I replied that, not being at my own disposal, I would do whatever obedience ordered me. I then withdrew, having remained with him about an hour and a half. Before long he again returned, and although I knew it to be the Will of God that I should speak with him, I nevertheless felt an extreme repugnance to be obliged to do so. I told him so at once. He replied that he was very pleased to have given me an opportunity of making a sacrifice to God. Then without trouble or method, I opened my heart and made known to him my inmost soul, both the good and the bad; whereupon he greatly consoled me, assuring me that there was nothing to fear in the guidance of that Spirit, since It did not withdraw me from obedience; that I ought to follow Its movements, abandoning to It my whole being, sacrificing and immolating myself according to Its good pleasure. At the same time he expressed his admiration at the goodness of God, in not having been repelled at so much resistance on my part. He further taught me to value the gifts of God and to receive with respect and humility the frequent communications and familiar converse with which he favored me, adding that I ought to in a continual state of thanksgiving towards such infinite goodness. I told him that as this Sovereign Lord of my soul pursued me so closely regardless of time or place, I was unable to pray vocally, and, although I did violence to myself in order to do so, I nevertheless remained sometimes without being able to pronounce a single word, especially when reciting the Rosary. He replied that I was not to force myself anymore to say vocal prayers but to be satisfied with what was of obligation, adding thereto the Rosary when I was able. Having mentioned some of the more special favours and expressions of love which I received from this Beloved of my soul, and which I refrain from describing here, he said that in all this, I had great cause to humble myself and to admire the mercy of God in my regard. But as this infinite Goodness did not wish that I should receive any consolation without its costing me many humiliations, this interview drew several upon me, and the Reverend Father himself had much to suffer on my account. For it was said that I wanted to deceive him and mislead him by my illusions, as I had done others. He was, however, in no way troubled by what was said, but continued nonetheless to help me, not only the short time he remained in this town, but always. Many a time I have been surprised that he did not abandon me as others had done, for the way in which I acted towards him would have repulsed any other; he spared me, however neither humiliations nor mortifications, which gratified me greatly.”
• Today we also celebrate a Saturday of our Lady, who leads us always to her Son provided, as the future St. John Paul II said in Gift and Mystery, “we relive her mystery in Christ.”
• Today the Blessed Mother’s and St. Claude’s intercession, we ask God to give us the grace to be distinguished, like he was, for lovingly leading other souls to God. In a particular way we ask for the gift of being able to lead them here, where the Son of God continues to look on us with compassion, to feed us, to incorporate us and our gifts into his self-giving, and to send us out to share his blessings with the Lord. At every Mass Jesus asks us what we have, takes it, changes it, multiplies it, and then sends us to share those gifts with others. The Mass is what the miracle of the multiplication of loaves and fish points to. In it we have the great multiplication of the “living bread come down from heaven,” that Jesus celebrated not close to the sea but in the Upper Room. The breaking of the unleavened bread in the Last Supper, and how Jesus miraculously transformed it into himself, is what the Church has been distributing ever since, a distribution that continues still today here. Likewise there’s meant to be a multiplication of fish. We’re that fish — caught by “fishers of men” before us with the same bait (Jesus) with whom they were caught by other fishers of men, tracing themselves back all the way to the time of the apostles — and Jesus wants to multiply us. He wants us to “increase and multiply” first by our uniting to him all that he’s previously given us, receiving from him these changed blessings, and then sending us out to give people the blessing to lead others to him. May we respond to the power of the Eucharist the way the Blessed Mother did in her Masses with St. John and St. Claude did and helped others to do!

The readings for today’s Mass were: