Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Agnes Church, Manhattan
Resumed Sixth Sunday after Epiphany
November 15, 2020
1 Thess 1:2-10, Mt 13:31-35
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click here:
The following text guided today’s homily:
Today many Catholics are anxious and fearful about the present and the future. The uncertainty about the recent election and about what changes might happen after January 20th, particularly with regard to the practice of our faith, the direction of the culture have filled many with worry. We see the global situation in which madmen invade a Catholic Church and kill three at daily Mass in Nice, Christian children are beheaded by the dozens in Mozambique by those identifying with ISIS, Catholic schools and parishes are attacked in northern Nigeria, the difficult circumstances in which Christians are living in Cuba or China or various other countries, the flight of Christians from the Holy Land, Iraq and Syria and more, and wonder what the future holds. The publication of the McCarrick report by the Vatican this week showed us in detail the former Cardinal’s decades of evil and corruption and how it wasn’t stopped by those in positions who could have and should have done so much more to protect young people, seminarians and the whole Church; it also raises questions about whether there’s been sufficient repentance to prevent recurrences to root the priesthood and episcopacy from people who would gave the system the way McCarrick did and of sufficient reforms to make sure men like him are never ordained. Many also note with concern the skyrocketing numbers of Covid-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths, concerned about the condition of our loved ones, neighbors, fellow parishioners, the first responders, even ourselves. We are anxious about whether State or local decisions about the pandemic will make it difficult or impossible for us to receive the Sacraments like we had to endure in the Spring. And we are troubled by what that will mean for the Church, conscious that only a third of people have returned to the sacraments after the Churches were reopened.
In the midst of all of these situations, Jesus speaks about the Kingdom of God in today’s Gospel in a way that should fill us with hope. Jesus’ listeners felt themselves a very small minority surrounded by hostile forces. The Scribes, Pharisees and Herodians were already conspiring to kill Jesus. They saw the power of the Roman army, the hostility of the religious leaders, the rejection of those in the cities to whom they had gone to preach who met them with hardened soil by the wayside. They knew their human limitations and were likely tempted on many occasions to question whether what they were doing was a hopeless enterprise. Jesus in today’s Gospel was reminding them that even though the kingdom may seem powerless and tiny, it’s not.
In the Parable of the Mustard Seed, we see that the kingdom begins very small, in the heart of one faithful person, but then over time, it can grow huge. This is, of course, what we see in how the Kingdom began in the Annunciation, when out of Mary’s yes, the Seed conceived within her by the power of the Holy Spirit, began to grow and eventually all nations would be embraced in the branches of his arms on the Cross. We saw that this is what happened on Pentecost, when out of this small band of apostles, the Church started and experienced great growth. We’ve seen this happen in the founding of parishes out of a few committed families, of religious movements and orders that only began with the founder or foundress, and in families when one person’s conversion led to the conversion of so many other generations. We witness it in the history of many dioceses, like what is now occurring in so many African countries and even in our country in the South and Southwest. We see it in the history of the Benedictines, the Franciscans, the Dominicans, Jesuits, Daughters of Charity, the Missionaries of Charity, the Sisters of Life here in New York, the CFRs and so many others. We see it in the explosive growth of FOCCUS on college campuses, the expansion of ministries like Word on Fire, the Augustine Institute, Dynamic Catholic, Ascension Press and others. What starts small, but with faith, grows. There’s, therefore, always reason for hope.
But we have to be honest. Sometimes we can wonder whether what Jesus said about the mustard seed has an expiration date. It seems that, even though we can point to success stories, many religious orders today, many parishes, even whole dioceses, are experiencing not continued growth but shrinkage. The Archdiocese of New York is closing Churches and schools rather than building new ones. Does this parable still have meaning? Of course it does! If we’ve gotten smaller, the Lord has permitted it — not wanted it! — so that he could somehow bring greater good out of it, including giving us all the opportunity to experience anew the full meaning of this parable, through beginning again, beginning smaller, like the new mustard seed planted from the tall tree.
The truth is that when the Church has become as big as a Middle Eastern mustard tree, we can forget many of the lessons that God teaches us in this lesson of the mustard seed. When the Church is a tree, an enormous institution, many people can stay on the peripheries and neither share in nor contribute to the growth God wants to bring about, convincing themselves that “others” will do the maintenance, pay the bills, welcome newcomers, spread the faith, and they can just reap the fruits. When it becomes huge, it can become corrupt, and people can take advantage of it like the former Cardinal McCarrick and others can be too concerned with other institutional matters to forget about the persons involved. When we become closer to the size of a mustard seed, however, we can’t pass the spiritual buck in the same way. We need to step to the plate. This is a grace. It’s a challenge. It’s also a promise and image of hope. The Lord Jesus wants us to become the living 21st century illustration of this parable. He wants us to have the opportunity to experience the exhilarating growth of the mustard seed. As we root ourselves in him, we have every hope that, just like thousands of times before us in the history of the Church, we’ll get bigger again and many others will be able to nest in the branches that will come from this union. Christian influence rather than waning will wax. We just need to trust in him like the first Christians. We need to trust in him like the founders of religious orders. We need to trust in him like the pioneer generations of lay faithful in parishes who sacrificed so much to build Churches on firm foundations.
St. Paul in today’s reading from his First Letter to the Thessalonians shows us what that trust looks like in practice. He had planted for God the mustard seed of faith in Thessalonika and in a few years it grew quite big and was now capable of moving mountains. St. Paul recalled with gratitude several elements of the receptivity and response of the first Christians there. He mentioned their “work of faith and labor of love and endurance in hope.” They worked to grow in faith, they labored to love, they endured plenty of difficulties, setbacks and contradictions, but never lost their hope. He spoke to them about the mystery of “how [they] were chosen,” and they took confidence in their divine vocation. He said that they received the Gospel not by “word alone, but also in power, in the Holy Spirit and much conviction.” That same word that changed human history there has lost none of its power. The Holy Spirit still blows. We need to believe, proclaim it and live it with similar conviction. He praises them for having become “imitators of us and of the Lord.” They tried to model their whole life on Paul and on Jesus. They turned to God, converting from idols — including the idols of money, sex, power — and “serving the living and true God.” All of these things led to their becoming “a model for all the believers in Macedonia and Achaia” and “in every place [where] your faith in God has gone forth.” The Lord hopes for a similar response from all of us. And if he gets it, we will experience a flourishing of the faith in areas where it has remained strong and a rebirth it places where it has grown cold.
That brings us to the second image Jesus gives us today to describe the growth of his kingdom: that of yeast in bread. The bread is the whole world and we Christians are called to be the leaven. Jesus teaches us essentially that one Christian in a neighborhood, or one truly Catholic family on a street, one faithful Catholic in a workplace or school should be enough over time to transform that neighborhood, street or school or workplace. The true Christian is the opposite of a “bad apple.” We know that one bad apple can quickly corrode a whole bushel. Christians are supposed to be the good apples. We are supposed to be the yeast that can make the whole world rise to God. The Lord wants us to be the yeast of this entire city. A saint always is. Just think about how many people Mother Teresa lifted up, or Dorothy Day or Frances Xavier Cabrini or Elizabeth Ann Seton here in this city, or Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen from this very Church. God can give us the same grace to have that impact in the circles we inhabit. But to carry out this mission, we need to be willing to take the Gospel into unleavened areas and live our faith with joy to the full.
Saint Pope Paul VI described this process of evangelization in his famous exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi: “Take a Christian or a handful of Christians who, in the midst of their own community, show their capacity for understanding and acceptance, their sharing of life and destiny with other people, their solidarity with the efforts of all for whatever is noble and good. Let us suppose that, in addition, they radiate in an altogether simple and unaffected way their faith in values that go beyond current values, and their hope in something that is not seen and that one would not dare to imagine. Through this wordless witness these Christians stir up irresistible questions in the hearts of those who see how they live: Why are they like this? Why do they live in this way? What or who is it that inspires them? Why are they in our midst? Such a witness is already a silent proclamation of the Good News and a very powerful and effective one. Here we have an initial act of evangelization. The above questions will ask, whether they are people to whom Christ has never been proclaimed, or baptized people who do not practice, or people who live as nominal Christians but according to principles that are in no way Christian, or people who are seeking, and not without suffering, something or someone whom they sense but cannot name. Other questions will arise, deeper and more demanding ones, questions evoked by this witness which involves presence, sharing, solidarity, and which is an essential element, and generally the first one, in evangelization.”
There’s a particular context in which we’re called to examine the growth of the Church in our day and in every age. It’s the ultimate criterion: charity. Jesus calls us to love God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength and says that will be shown in the way that we love all those whom the Father loved enough to send his Son to die for. Today is the fourth World Day of the Poor, started by Pope Francis in 2017, to help us all get very practical about the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. The spread of the faith will come through believers’ truly living it. Sometimes people can be suspicious when Catholics try to engage them in the deeper questions, feeling like they’re somehow being instrumentalized in a Catholic’s pursuit of “converts.” They don’t see it as an expression of love. That’s one of the reasons why, for the Church’s to mission to be credible as she tries to preach the Gospel to all creatures, she must lead with tangible charity, with what St. Paul called the “labor of love,” so that people will recognize that the same charity that impels us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger, care for the sick, visit the imprisoned, shelter the homeless, is the same one that leads us to care for others’ souls, too.
Pope Francis said this morning in his homily in St. Peter’s Basilica, “The poor are at the heart of the Gospel; we cannot understand the Gospel without the poor.” We can’t preach it, in other words, unless we recognize that Jesus came to preach the Gospel not to principally to preach the Gospel to Robin Leach and his rich and famous friends, but as Jesus himself said in his hometown synagogue, to the poor. Pope Francis said, “The poor are like Jesus himself, who, though rich, emptied himself, made himself poor, even taking sin upon himself: the worst kind of poverty. … Even now [the poor] help us become rich in love. For the worst kind of poverty needing to be combatted is our poverty of love,” our failure to love others with the love with which we have first been loved by God. St. John of the Cross used to teach that in the twilight of life, we will be judged by love. Pope Francis preached today about our judgment, that “the pretense of this world will fade, with its notion that success, power and money give life meaning, whereas love – the love we have given – will be revealed as true riches.” He made his own the quotation of Saint John Chrysostom, “When death comes and the theatre is deserted, when all remove their masks of wealth or of poverty and depart hence, judged only by their works, they will be seen for what they are: some truly rich, others poor,” and commented, “If we do not want to live life poorly, let us ask for the grace to see Jesus in the poor, to serve Jesus in the poor.” This is the heart of the Gospel, the application of the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the illustration of how to love others as Christ has loved us in our poverty first. This is the means by which the Church will be reformed and rebuilt. This is the means by which we will lift up all of our society as leaven and become a strong and sturdy mustard tree capable of giving shelter and rest to eagles and sparrows alike.
This whole mystery of starting small and growing big is summarized in the Mass. The Mass is the place where Jesus seeks to plant himself within us as a seed, as a “grain of wheat” (Jn 12:24) on good soil that together with him can bear abundant growth. He implants himself on our insides and allows us to enter through Holy Communion into the inner life of God. This is where he loves us and empowers us to love others by his same body-giving and blood-shedding standard. This is where all growth in the Church begins. If we receive even the littlest piece of the Sacred Host within us, we receive God and all his power, and from that seemingly small start are transformed in such a way that with him living in us we might become leaven for the whole world as we become model for all believers in Manhattan and in every place our faith in God goes forth.
The readings for today’s Mass were:
A reading from the First Letter of St. Paul to the Thessalonians
We give thanks to God always for all of you, remembering you in our prayers, unceasingly calling to mind your work of faith and labor of love and endurance in hope of our Lord Jesus Christ, before our God and Father, knowing, brothers loved by God, how you were chosen. For our gospel did not come to you in word alone, but also in power and in the holy Spirit and [with] much conviction. You know what sort of people we were [among] you for your sake. And you became imitators of us and of the Lord, receiving the word in great affliction, with joy from the holy Spirit, so that you became a model for all the believers in Macedonia and in Achaia. For from you the word of the Lord has sounded forth not only in Macedonia and [in] Achaia, but in every place your faith in God has gone forth, so that we have no need to say anything. For they themselves openly declare about us what sort of reception we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God and to await his Son from heaven, whom he raised from [the] dead, Jesus, who delivers us from the coming wrath.
The continuation of the Gospel according to St. Matthew
At that time, Jesus addressed to the crowds this parable. “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that a person took and sowed in a field. It is the smallest of all the seeds, yet when full-grown it is the largest of plants. It becomes a large bush, and the ‘birds of the sky come and dwell in its branches.’” He spoke to them another parable. “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed with three measures of wheat flour until the whole batch was leavened.” All these things Jesus spoke to the crowds in parables. He spoke to them only in parables, to fulfill what had been said through the prophet: “I will open my mouth in parables, I will announce what has lain hidden from the foundation of the world.”
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