The Integral Unity Between Worship and Charity, 23rd Monday (II), September 9, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the 23rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
September 9, 2024
1 Cor 5:8, Ps 5, Lk 6:6-11

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

The following text guided today’s homily: 

• Jesus’ mission was not just to save and sanctify but to revolutionize, to turn right side up, the way his people had distorted religion, to give us new wineskins to receive new wine. It was to restore true holiness of life, to help us learn how, in an integrated way, to love God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength and to love our neighbor as Christ would love us. One distortion was, of course, people who took God for granted and didn’t even care about keeping their end of the Covenant, those who would make material possessions, or pleasure, or power and pride their idols. Another, which we encounter in today’s Gospel, was through the changing of religion from within and trying to apply religious zeal not to the worship of the true God but to essentially a man-made idol. The latter distortion was epitomized by the way some of the Scribes and Pharisees treated the Sabbath, making it a day of extraordinary rules about everything they couldn’t do, rather than a day of loving God with all they had and loving their neighbor. The Scribes and the Pharisees went to the Synagogue on the Sabbath, but they really weren’t going to praise God. St. Luke tells us that their main focus was to “watch Jesus closely to see if he would cure on the Sabbath so that they might discover a reason to accuse him.” The suffering of the man with the withered hand didn’t matter much to them. St. Luke’s term for this man’s hand was that it had “dried up”: in other words, it had once had life in it but no longer did. One of the apocryphal Gospels in describing this scene said that the man was a mason who had been injured on the job and could no longer work and support himself and his family. But such an injured laborer’s plight didn’t concern the Pharisees at all. Even though they would rescue an animal from a trap on a Sabbath, they wouldn’t care for their fellow man, as if restoring him to health would somehow be offensive to God. So Jesus, reading their hearts, asked the question: “Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath rather than to do evil, to save life rather than to destroy it?” It was a poignant question because he was intending to do good and to save life, and they were intending to do evil and destroy life. What Jesus was doing somehow they found objectionable, but what they were doing — focusing themselves on preventing Jesus’ doing good and then conspiring to plot his demise — was somehow licit to do, not only at all but especially on the Lord’s Day. They didn’t answer Jesus’ question for obvious reasons.
• Jesus then worked his miracle of mercy, not only to do good to the man with the withered hand and restore his livelihood but do good to his objectors and to all of us by showing us the true meaning of the Sabbath and revealing to us God’s desire to make us whole. He had the man with the injured hand come and stand before everyone, the first of the two steps of faith by which the man would cooperate in his own healing. Then he said to the man, in the second step of faith, “Stretch out your hand!” He was telling someone who hadn’t been able to move his hand for who knows how long to make an act of the will and do the impossible. And St. Luke the beloved physician says something beautiful and noteworthy: not “his hand was restored and he did so,” but, “he did so and his hand was restored.” He first extended himself in faith and that was part of his restoration. As this man was stretching out his hand in response to Jesus’, we can, in a sense, imagine an act of recreation in which, reminiscent of Michelangelo’s scene of creation, God stretched forth his hand as his creature likewise did and it was in that action that the breath and restoration of life was given.
• Jesus worked the miracle in today’s Gospel not only on the Sabbath but in a synagogue to show that he had come as Messiah to rehabilitate the meaning of worship, indicating to us that to love God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength involves loving our neighbor as he loves them. There is a connection between our worship of God and our reverence of others: As St. Teresa of Calcutta emphasized, the same Jesus who says “This is my Body,” and “This is the chalice of my Blood,” is the one who says, “I was sick and you cared for me.” The worship Christ came to inaugurate and renew involves this union between faith and life, between what we believe and what we do. Our worship of the God of love is meant to transform us more and more into his image so that all of us may make our lives living exegeses of St. Paul’s phrase, “caritas Christi urget nos,” the love of Christ — both subjectively and objectively — compels us (2 Cor 5:14).
• These thoughts are very relevant for us to understand what was happening in today’s first reading from St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, because there was a clear separation between worship and life. St. Paul had been told that it was widely known among the Church in Corinth that there was “an immorality of a kind not found even among pagans,” an incestuous relationship in which a man was in a relationship with his own stepmother. That was problem enough. But the bigger problem, St. Paul says, was that the Corinthian Christians were “inflated with pride” whereas they should “have been sorrowful.” They should have been humble. They should have recognized their need for God’s mercy and for trying to bring those in their community to recognize their need for that mercy. Rather than being ashamed, rather than mourning the offense against God, the damage being done to both the man and his stepmother, and the scandal that was now widely reported, they responded with proud neglect, as if that sin really didn’t impact them. In Corinth, there was so much debauchery among the pagans that people had easily become used to it, and not only were they not properly scandalized, but they also didn’t love their brother enough to do anything about it. Like the Pharisees’ callous heedlessness of the man with a withered hand, they were indifferent to their fellow believer with the withered soul.  St. Paul needed to show them the way. The man needed to be excommunicated — “expelled from your midst” — and this man needed to be “deliver[ed] … to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.” The world itself was considered under the dominion of the evil and St. Paul was saying that this man, as medicine, needed to be shown that by his actions he was cutting himself off from grace, from Christ’s body, from the Church and choosing Satan over God, Barabbas in the disguise of his stepmother over Christ, destruction over life. This would be the means by which, hopefully, the man would come to his senses like the Prodigal Son, convert and return to the path of salvation. Such thoughts are clearly relevant to the situation of the Church today. Many in the Church have become desensitized to immorality in our midst, even immorality that honest non-Christians would never engage in. Rather than being ashamed, we tolerate it, and in some circles of the Church even celebrate it as a good. Rather than showing that breaking the sixth commandment and not repenting of it is conduct that separates us from Christ, many still insist that despite such immoral conduct they should still be able to receive communion or celebrate the Eucharist. The lack of integrity, this lack of consistency between faith and life, is harming the Church and through the Church the world, and few shepherds and faithful have the courage to speak out about it like St. Paul. Few love God and others enough even to shame, not to mention medicinally excommunicate, those who are wandering far from Christ and scandalously encouraging others to follow them on that path.
• Someone who shows us the type of communion between the worship of God the true, passionate, sacrificial love of neighbor is the spiritual hero the Church celebrates today, St. Peter Claver, the great apostle to the slaves in Colombia. As a young Jesuit, full of love of God and others, St. Peter left his native Spain in order to go to Cartagena to minister to the African slaves when they would disembark after a brutal trans-Pacific journey, be sold and bought. Their condition was execrable. He spent his last 44 years of life as a slave to the slaves, a Good Samaritan, catechizing them by learning their dialects or finding translators, baptizing more than 300,000 of them himself, sharing their life and doing everything he could to introduce them to Christ and to how he has overturned worldly values. He slept in the slaves’ quarters rather than in their masters’ when he came to preach missions to them. And he sought to proclaim the Gospel and bring the message of conversion to the slaveowners, trying to help them recognize that their faith in God was implicated in the way they treated the slaves. In the letter that the Church ponders on his feast day in the Office of Readings, St. Peter Claver shows how everything he sought to do for the slaves culminated in introducing them to the mystery of God’s love on the Cross, so that they may unite their own sufferings to Christ and become truly interior free. “Yesterday, May 30, 1627, on the feast of the Most Holy Trinity,” he wrote to his Jesuit superiors, “numerous blacks, brought from the rivers of Africa, disembarked from a large ship. Carrying two baskets of oranges, lemons, sweet biscuits, and I know not what else, we hurried toward them. … We had to force our way through the crowd until we reached the sick. Large numbers of the sick were lying on the wet ground or rather in puddles of mud. … We laid aside our cloaks, therefore, and brought from a warehouse whatever was handy to build a platform. … There were two blacks, nearer death than life, already cold, whose pulse could scarcely be detected. With the help of a tile we pulled some live coals together and placed them in the middle near the dying men. Into this fire we tossed aromatics. Of these we had two wallets full, and we used them all up on this occasion. Then, using our own cloaks, for they had nothing of this sort, … we provided for them a smoke treatment, by which they seemed to recover their warmth and the breath of life. The joy in their eyes as they looked at us was something to see. This was how we spoke to them, not with words but with our hands and our actions. And in fact, convinced as they were that they had been brought here to be eaten, any other language would have proved utterly useless. Then we sat, or rather knelt, beside them and bathed their faces and bodies with wine. We made every effort to encourage them with friendly gestures and displayed in their presence the emotions that somehow naturally tend to hearten the sick. After this we began an elementary instruction about baptism, that is, the wonderful effects of the sacrament on body and soul. When by their answers to our questions they showed they had sufficiently understood this, we went on to a more extensive instruction, namely, about the one God, who rewards and punishes each one according to his merit, and the rest. We asked them to make an act of contrition and to manifest their detestation of their sins. Finally, when they appeared sufficiently prepared, we declared to them the mysteries of the Trinity, the Incarnation and the Passion. Showing them Christ fastened to the cross, as he is depicted on the baptismal font on which streams of blood flow down from his wounds, we led them in reciting an act of contrition in their own language.” Everything ultimately led to their worship on Christ fastened to the Cross and how the blood and water flowing from his side made Baptism a real share in his passion, death and resurrection. He was showing them how to enter into and participate in Christ’s love which made him capable of bearing such enormous sufferings. He was helping them to recognize Christ could make them rich in their poverty, and to sanctify their hunger, their sufferings, even their dehumanization, for Christ ultimately identified with them in their maltreatment. He preached to everyone he could, even from a stretcher when we was too infirm to walk. He sought to love the slaves with the love with which he sought to love God, because he grasped that whatever he did to them he was doing to Christ himself. That’s the ultimate unity of life between love of God and love of neighbor, between faith and life.
• St. Paul says at the end of today’s passage that “a little yeast leavens all the dough.” It’s necessary to clean out the “old yeast … of malice and wickedness,” he said, and “celebrate the feast … with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” The old yeast is the “yeast of the Pharisees” about which Jesus would warn the apostles when they were with him in a boat, but the yeast Jesus would call his Church to become, where one person would be able to lift up his or her whole surroundings toward God. We’re called to be that type of leaven. As we prepare to encounter him in Holy Communion, he says to us, essentially, “Stretch out your lives!” We beg his help to do so in a way that we may live out true worship through our charity — and others may no longer widely report that there is immorality among us not of a kind found even among non-Christians, but rather that there is a morality among us that draws even non-Christians to Christ as its source!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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