The Joy That Relativizes All Pain, Sixth Friday of Easter, May 10, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Friday of the Sixth Week of Easter
Memorial of Saint Damien of Molokai
May 10, 2024
Acts 18:9-18, Ps 47, Jn 16:20-23

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

The following points were attempted during the homily: 

• It’s easy to see why the Church gives us today’s Gospel passage on the day after the Ascension of the Lord. Jesus says to us today, “I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice and no one will take your joy away from you.” These words certainly apply to what is to happen, we pray by God’s mercy, to each of us one day when we see Jesus in all his glory and have a chance to rejoice with all the saints. But we know that these words were said during the Last Supper and were referring more precisely to what would happen over the course of the subsequent three days, that Jesus would be taken away from them, that they would mourn as many around them among the chief priests, scribes and Pharisees were rejoicing, but that when Jesus would return risen from the dead, they would indeed rejoice with a joy that would know no bounds or end.
• What I’d like to focus on today, however, are two things that Jesus says to us in the Gospel that are central for our living our Catholic faith in light of Jesus’ Resurrection and Ascension to God’s right hand where he’s gone to prepare a place for us.
• The first is his image of childbirth as an analogy of what he was about to endure and what we as Christians need to endure. To describe the passage from grief to joy, he said, “When a woman is in labor, she is in anguish because her hour has arrived; but when she has given birth to a child, she no longer remembers the pain because of her joy that a child has been born into the world.” After the Fall, no woman looks forward to labor, but once a child is born, the pain of contractions and childbirth are all relativized due to the great joy of holding her baby in her arms. To experience that joy, however, you have to go through birth pangs. You can’t have the joy of a mom without it. It’s similar in the spiritual life. In order to enter into the joy of Jesus’ resurrection, we need to enter into his labor, his contractions, his pangs to bring about a new world. We need to enter into his Passion, death and resurrection. One of the reasons why many people, including Catholics, don’t experience the joy of Easter sufficiently is precisely because they haven’t entered into labor with Christ. They haven’t grieved with Jesus over the sins that brought about the pains of spiritual childbirth. Jesus permits us some sufferings precisely so that we can appreciate the joy that comes from his redeeming presence. There’s a similar pain in the life of spiritual motherhood or fatherhood exercised by parents as well as by religious and priests. St. Paul wrote to the Galatians, “My children, for whom I am again in labor until Christ be formed in you!”(Gal 4:19). We suffer until the presence, the love, the joy of Christ be brought to completion in others. In summary, in human life there’s a concomitant experience between the pangs of childbirth and the joy of holding one’s child after it, but the latter is meant to overwhelm the former.
• That leads to the second point I want to capture from today’s Gospel: how Jesus says that when he comes back, “on that day you will not question me about anything.” They will have no more questions precisely because Jesus through his Resurrection — and all the more through his Ascension and eventual second coming — will become the definitive Answer to every fundamental question we have. If we’re wondering about the meaning of our or a loved one’s or a sick child’s suffering and death, we’re able to see that after the childbirth contractions of those sufferings, even after a life full of sufferings, there is to be a joy greater than a mom’s holding her first born child. The Resurrection of Jesus is what gives meaning to the pangs experienced by the martyrs, to the sufferings we experience in trying to live by or spread our faith.
• We see both of these truths at work in the experience of St. Paul in today’s first reading. Soon after Paul arrived in Corinth and was rejected by the Jews in the Synagogue, Jesus appeared to him in a vision and said, “Do not be afraid. Go on speaking and do not be silent, for I am with you” and “I have many people in this city.” What was St. Paul afraid of? He wasn’t afraid of physical suffering. He had already had his share of beatings, stonings, perilous journeys, imprisonments and revilement. He was a little afraid, it seems, of preaching about this necessary childbirth we need in order to experience Christian joy. On Wednesday, we encountered St. Paul in Athens, when he gave an extraordinary rhetorical address announcing to the Athenians in the Areopagus the identity of the “unknown god” to whom they had erected an altar. But as beautiful as that philosophical and theological oratory was, it wasn’t particularly effective. Other than a few people, the vast majority politely either scorned what he said or blew him off, saying that they would hear about this from him on another day. And they did this because he was talking about Jesus’ having been raised from the dead. Paul didn’t even bother saying that this unknown God had be brutally crucified. After that failure, Paul crossed the isthmus into Corinth and, with God’s help, reached a conclusion. He gives witness to it in his first letter to the Church in Corinth, which came later. “When I came to you, brothers, proclaiming the mystery of God,” he wrote, “I did not come with sublimity of words or of wisdom. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. I came to you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my message and my proclamation were not with persuasive [words of] wisdom, but with a demonstration of spirit and power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God” (1 Cor 2:1-5). What was that power and wisdom? It’s Christ crucified and our need to be crucified with him. “Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks alike, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:22-24). As we see in the early preaching of St. Paul — different from St. Peter’s — Paul didn’t feature Christ’s crucifixion because he knew that it was a “scandal” to Jews (who would obviously struggle to accept that the Messiah, who was expected to evict occupying forces and reestablish the Davidic kingdom, would be publicly executed by that same occupying force, not to mention that he would both claim to be God and then be killed, something that they would have considered unfathomable) and a “folly” to Greek pagans (because wisdom was the art of living and dying well, and someone who couldn’t avoid crucifixion was obviously a fool). But after Athens, he resolved that, rather than running away, he would begin to show how Jesus on the Cross was the power and wisdom of God, the power of divine love and the true wisdom of how to live and die so as to live forever. That’s what Jesus was telling him not to be afraid to proclaim. And St. Paul would proclaim it not principally with words but with his own life, entering into Jesus’ own childbirth to such a degree that he would be able to say to the Galatians later that he had been crucified with Christ and the life he now lived in the flesh he lived by faith in the Son of God who loved him and gave his life up for him (Gal 2:20). Jesus’ resurrection was the dramatic explanation of, the definitive response to, the purpose of his and all suffering, and St. Paul was able to lead many on that passage from childbirth to joy.
• One saint who entered into the pangs of Christ’s paschal mystery in his own life is Joseph de Veuster (1840-1889), whom we remember as Saint Damien of Molokai. Born in Belgium to a religious family, when he was 24, his brother Auguste, whom he had followed into the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts, was too ill to go as a missionary to Hawaii, and Damien took his place. He was ordained a priest there and worked for nine years mostly on the island of Hawaii. He showed early signs of his pastoral zeal and willingness to undergo the pangs of spiritual parenthood in a letter he to his parents, imploring them, “Do not forget this poor priest running night and day over the volcanoes night and day in search of strayed sheep. Pray night and day for me, I beg you.” In 1873, Bishop Louis Maigret briefed the Sacred Hearts Fathers on the need for priestly ministrations in Kalaupapa on the Island of Molokai, which King Kamehameha V had set up seven years earlier to quarantine lepers. Of the 816 with Hansen’s Disease in the enclave, 200 were Catholic, and he had received letters from several of them begging him to send a priest so that they might suffer and die with the consolation of the sacraments. The bishop knew what he was proposing: a slow martyrdom, as chaplain to a walking graveyard. Fully conscious of the consequences, Fr. Damien stepped forward to take the assignment. When he arrived on May 10, 1873 — the reason why we celebrate his feast day on May 10 — Bishop Maigret prophetically introduced him to the colony of lepers as “one who will be a father to you, and who loves you so much that he does not hesitate to become one of you, to live and die with you.”
• The 33-year old priest got right down to work — every type of work. He built churches, homes and beds. He created farms and schools and worked to enforce basic laws. He fought to have medicine sent and to get his people whatever medical care was possible. At first, it was hard for him to approach the lepers because he had a natural revulsion to the fetid odor given off by their leprous sores. To overcome this olfactory repugnance, he began to smoke a pipe so that the smell of tobacco would make it possible for him to approach the lepers with dignity as he began to dress their ulcers. While what he could do for their deteriorating bodies was limited, he knew that he could help prepare their souls to meet the Lord, to help them live with an eternal purpose. Helping them to focus on the joy after the pangs of childbirth in this world, they could better endure the sufferings of leprosy. The first thing he did was to give increased attention to the funeral rites. He knew that if the lepers saw how much care he showed them at their death, they might begin to sense the value of their lives. He brought them the sacraments at their bedsides and tidied their rooms and beds to await the imminent visit of the Lord Jesus. He formed choirs, taught them how to sing beautiful hymns at Requiem Masses, and trained others to play musical instruments. He cleaned the cemetery and adorned it with flowers. He even made coffins. At the same time, he instituted perpetual adoration, so that the lepers would know that the Lord Jesus was with them always and so that they would have the opportunity to pour out their hearts to Him in their need. Father Damien knew, too, that this was what sustained him. “I find my consolation,” he wrote in a letter, “in the one and only companion who will never leave me, that is, our Divine Savior in the Holy Eucharist.… Without the Blessed Sacrament a position like mine would be unbearable. But having Our Lord at my side, I continue always to be happy and content.” It is unsurprising that his witness began to win over the members of his community. Six months after his arrival, he had 400 people — half the village and two thirds of those who were not Catholic at his arrival — preparing for baptism. A cheerful spirit began to radiate in the community in place of the former dejection. In December of 1884, Fr. Damien discovered that he had contracted leprosy, and his spiritual contractions would begin. He wrote, “My eyebrows are beginning to fall out. Soon I will be disfigured entirely. Having no doubts about the true nature of my disease, I am calm, resigned, and very happy in the midst of my people.” He had entered into communion with their leprosy as well, but was suffering in Christ. To those who asked him how he was holding up, he said, “Our Lord will give me the graces I need to carry my cross and follow him, even to our special Calvary at Kalawao.” He died on Tuesday of Holy Week in 1889. Just as the Lord Jesus loved us enough that he came into our world, took on our human flesh, and through many contractions and sufferings redeemed it, so Fr. Damien entered into the lepers’ world, courageously took on their dreaded disease, and united it and them to the Lord. In the Opening Prayer of the Mass, we asked God the Father to grant us, through St. Damien’s intercession and like him, to be “faithful witnesses of the heart of your Son Jesus” through being “servants of the most needy and rejected.” Together with the Holy Spirit, he was a faithful witness of the heart of Jesus, because with faith, he heard Jesus’ words about loving his neighbor and acted on them to the point of laying down his life. He lived out the moral communion that flows from our baptismal communion, loving the lepers with the very love of Christ, and becoming for them and for us an icon of Christ’s tender, merciful love for every person, which no illness, however repulsive, can disfigure. He was willing to endure all the sufferings necessary to give them birth into a new world that would know no end.
• During Mass, all of us enter into Jesus’ childbirth, his labor pains, as we enter in time into his eternal passage through suffering and death to the joy of new life. It’s here that we bring all our labor pains and end up, not by holding a beautiful baby in our hands — as happy an experience as that is for every one — but something even greater. We get to hold Jesus Christ in our hands just like Mary and Joseph did, and then become one with Him on the inside. Many people don’t experience anywhere near the joy that this is supposed to give because they haven’t gone through the stages of grieving, the pains coming from their grievous sins, the wounds received by the grievous sins of others. But this is what the Mass makes possible. And during this second day of the Decenarium of the Holy Spirit, we can ponder the Gift of Courage as we pray in the Veni Creator Spiritus, the “firmans virtute perpeti,” that God the Holy Spirit may make us strong with his perpetual power, the power and wisdom of Christ crucified to Whom the Spirit wishes to conform us. As we unite ourselves to Christ’s delivery and Christ’s Eucharistic birth, he and the Spirit both say to us what Jesus said to Paul at the beginning of today’s first reading, “Do not be afraid. Go on speaking, and do not be silent, for I am with you. For I am many people in this city” and we rejoice to be one of those many!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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