The Kingdom United that Stands, 27th Friday (I), October 11, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Friday of the 27th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of Pope Saint John XXIII
October 11, 2019
Joel 1:13-15.2:1-2, Ps 9, Lk 11:15-26

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Over the last two days we have been listening to Jesus teach us about prayer and how to relate to God the Father. He instructed us to ask the Father with confidence not to let us fall when tempted and to prevent us from the evil one. He then taught us about the importance of persevering in prayer with the Parable of the Neighbor asking for Three Loaves at Midnight so that we may learn how to persevere in the Christian life until the end. Today’s readings focus on that necessary perseverance in life because of the way that devil persistently tries to tempt us to choose to divide ourselves from the love of God and the love of neighbor.
• The prophet Joel is the eighth of the eight post-exilic authors and shows us what eventually happened to the returned Jews. They came with great hope and joy at the return from Babylon, pondered anew with detail the word of God, committed to keep it, and rebuilt the temple. But eventually they started to fall back into their old habits and the Prophet Joel needed to wake them up. At the end of the Gospel today, Jesus mentions that once the devil has been banished and finds the house of the soul swept and in order, he returns with seven stronger demons to try to tempt them to fall even worse. That’s what was happening with the Jews. After they had gotten things back into order, they were now descending anew. That is a perennial concern for everyone.
• In the Gospel, Jesus speaks to us about the work of the devil in the Gospel and the main thrust of his work. The work of the devil is to divide and the main focus of Jesus’ work is to save us and sanctify us by bringing us into communion with God and in Him with others. Christ during the Last Supper prayed for a unity resembling the Trinity. He did that through his incarnation, his life, his passion, death and resurrection. We prayed in the Gospel verse about what he how he had said that when he would be lifted up on the Cross, he would draw all men to himself — and out of the clutches of the evil one. We remember from St. Mark’s Gospel the two essential aspects involved in life with Jesus: he calls us to be with him and to send us out. The devil wants to divide us from Jesus and prevent our going out as effective, ardent apostles. And he normally seeks to achieve both objectives by division, dividing us from genuine love of neighbor and thereby separating us from God. This is exactly the opposite of what Christ seeks: to gather us to him and to send us out to gather others. We see in the first reading how through the prophet Joel, in response to their new sins, sought to gather elders and all those who dwell in the land into the house of the Lord for prayer.
• Someone who understood this great passion for unity is the pope whose feast day we celebrate today. Saint John XXIII died on June 3, 1963, but we celebrate his feast day today, October 11, the day he, responding to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, convened the Second Vatican Council. The Second Vatican Council was an attempt to launch a new Pentecost, to open the windows of the Church for the Holy Spirit to come in with his tongues of fire to propose the Gospel in a compelling way to the people of today so as to bring people together. Throughout his ministry, he sought to unite us to Christ in a Church and world that was growing increasing polarized as a result of two world wars, various genocides and the cold war, as a result of a growing separation between north and south, between rich and poor, developed and developing. He sought to try to gather people together in communion with the “Stronger Man” and the full strength of the Good Shepherd’s love. We can focus on a few ways he did so.
• The first was by maintaining a strong communion with the Lord through a life of personal holiness. He knew he couldn’t gather others for Christ unless he were intimately united with him. From the time he was a 14-year-old in a high school seminary, he grasped that in order to bear fruit in his life, he needed to live by a “Rule of life,” a set of spiritual practices that would help him grow in conformity to Christ, and he kept them his entire life. After his death, his former secretary said that John’s “Rules of Life” were truly rules for life. “He copied them out by hand, in minute writing, kept them always by him and constantly observed them, even when he was pope,” Cardinal Loris Capovilla said. They were the blueprint for John’s growth in sanctity in correspondence to God’s grace, his means of growing stronger through communion with the Stronger Man.
• The second way he gathered was through tenderness. He was called “Il Papa Buono,” the Good Pope, in his lifetime because of the way he tenderly loved others with a father’s heart and encouragement. The night before the opening of the Second Vatican Council, he told parents in his memorable “moonlight speech” to the throngs who had assembled in St. Peter’s Square to go home, hug their kids and say, “This is a hug from the Pope.” People never forgot it, because it showed the affection of God through his vicar and icon. He showed God the Father’s love for his family.
• Third, he focused on the need for mercy, which heals the wounds that divides and seeks to establish true reconciliation. The purpose for convening the Council, he said on this day in 1962, was “that the sacred deposit of Christian doctrine should be guarded and taught more
 efficaciously,” noting that “the substance of the ancient doctrine of the deposit of faith is one thing, and the way in which it is presented is another.” He thought our age needed a special presentation of the faith with regard to the errors of the day.  He said that most Councils were called to oppose errors, saying, “Frequently she has condemned them with the greatest severity. Nowadays however, the Spouse of Christ prefers to make use of the medicine of mercy rather than that of severity. … The Catholic Church, raising the torch of religious truth by means of this Ecumenical Council, desires to show herself to be the loving mother of all, benign, patient, full of mercy and goodness.” That is the means in the modern world, he thought, that the Church could be best a sign of unity and an instrument of God’s peace.
• The great work of gathering us to Christ, of uniting us in communion, happens here at Mass where Jesus, the Strong Man, seeks to make us one body, one spirit with Him and others. It’s here that we receive the help we need to defeat the devil’s attempted sabotage of our lives. It’s here that we remember each day with joy that we are the disciples of the one who has defeated the devil and conquered even death and sin. It’s here, with John the XXIII, that we commit ourselves anew to holiness and to the work of gathering with Christ into a united kingdom that will stand strong into eternity.

The readings for today’s Mass were: