The Leaven of Faith That Perseveres Through Temptation, Sixth Tuesday (II), February 13, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Tuesday of the Sixth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Blessed James Miller, Martyr
February 13, 2024
Jas 1:12-18, Ps 94, Mk 8:14-21

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• In the Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples with him in the boat to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of Herod. Leaven, we know, is small and almost imperceptible but it gives growth to bread. The leaven of the Pharisees was what we observed in the Gospel yesterday, this incessant desire for signs, for external works of the law, for arguing with Jesus and rejecting him. It’s, as Jesus says elsewhere, their hypocrisy, their being whitewashed tombs, beautiful on the outside but full of filth and death on the inside. It’s their focus on straining out gnats and swallowing camels.  It’s a religious externalism serving to enhance pride. It’s literally a “separation” from others, including sinners, out of the idea that that is pleasing to God. The leaven of Herod means a sensual, political and spiritually worldly approach to life without sincerity in the relationship with God, something we see in St. Mark’s Gospel earlier when Herod just wants to meet Jesus when he hears about him because some said he was John the Baptist risen from the dead. In both cases, their leaven was an absence of real faith. It was not a focus on God but on themselves, on their own works, their own pleasures, their own doubts and questions.
• Jesus then described a different type of leaven, what we might call a divine yeast, shown in the two different miracles of the multiplications of loaves and fish. The leaven Jesus wants is faith, is trust in Him, is confidence that even if the apostles didn’t bring bread into the boat that somehow God would take care of them like he took care of the vast multitudes with the multiplications. Jesus asks us the same question he asked them, “Do you still not understand?” He further asks, “Do you have eyes and not see, ears and not hear?,” bringing back what he said before the interpretation of the Sower and the Seed, basing himself on Isaiah, that he gives us parables to force us to work a little to understand them. The multiplication of the loaves and fish were similar to parables, he implied, that he wanted us to ponder to get their bigger meaning. Jesus wants this leaven of faith to grow in us, so that we trust in him increasingly. He tells us elsewhere in the Gospel that unless we convert and become like little children, we will not enter the kingdom of God. To become childlike is to grow in trust. Sometimes as we age we become more cynical, less faithful, less trusting in God or in anyone else. We become “wise” in worldly calculations but foolish in faith. Jesus wants to give us a different type of growth.
• St. James talks about the bad leaven of growth in succumbing to temptation versus the good leaven of growth through persevering faith in temptation. The one who perseveres faithfully during trials, he says, is “blessed” and will receive the “crown of life” after having been proven. On the other hand, he describes the curse of succumbing to temptation and what it can lead to, death. He first says that no one should say, “I am being tempted by God,” because God doesn’t tempt. He permits temptations so that we may pass the test of temptations with fidelity, but he doesn’t send them. The root of our temptations, St. James describes, is our desires. God has made us desire good things and we always desire things under the “aspect of good.” Thieves desire the good of material possessions. Vengeful people desire the good of others’ not doing harm. Lustful people desire the good of human sexuality and the feeling of love. The problem is that they desire these goods in a disordered way, outside of the hierarchy of goods willed by God. They want property without working for it, or the other’s ceasing to do evil through suffering violence, or sex and love apart from marriage and the love of God. Once we begin to desire things disordinately, we get drawn by those desires to sin, and if we don’t repent, we become corrupt and spiritually die, by making the fulfillment of such desires more important than God. St. James describes the process in the following way: “Each person is tempted when lured and enticed by his desire. Then desire conceives and brings forth sin, and when sin reaches maturity it gives birth to death.”
• The solution to this growth in sin through caving into our tempted desires is the leaven of the Word of God, not just knowing it, by clinging to it and living it. St. James says that God “willed to give us birth by the word of truth that we may be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.” The Responsorial Psalm builds on this, that the man who takes God’s instruction is blessed: “Blessed the man whom you instruct, O Lord, whom by your law you teach, Giving him rest from evil days. … When I say, ‘My foot is slipping,’ your mercy, O Lord, sustains me; When cares abound within me, your comfort gladdens my soul.” God wants to sustain us, just like Jesus was sustained in the desert while being tempted by the devil, by his holy word, not just known but believed and enfleshed. God wants not only to help the leaven of faith in us to grow but to help us become his leaven to raise up the world.
• One who shows us the fruit of divine leaven as a disciple and apostle is the great, yet still practically unknown, American Beatus the Church celebrates today, LaSallian Brother James Alfred Miller. A native of Stevens Point, Wisconsin, he was martyred for the faith in Guatemala on this day in 1982. Pope Francis, in his 2018 exhortation on holiness, Gaudete et Exsultate, wrote about the “saints next door,” and in many ways Blessed James is an all-American holy neighbor, a man of faith who became true leaven. He was born in 1944 — he would have turned 80 this September 21 — and grew up working hard on his family’s dairy and chicken farm in Custer, Wisconsin, praying at home, and wanting to be priest. He was fascinated by other countries, reading an encyclopedia from cover to cover to get to know foreign countries and regions where he hoped to bring the faith. When he entered Pacelli High School and met the Brothers of the Christian Schools, he quickly discerned he had a vocation to share in their educational apostolate. He entered the juniorate of the community at 15 (much like boys at that time could enter high school seminaries at 14), became a postulant and novice at 18, professed first vows at 21 and final vows at 26. He was sent by the Christian Brothers to St. Mary’s University in Winona, Minnesota, where, hoping to share in their missionary apostolates, he got Bachelors’ and Master’s degrees in Spanish. He was described by those who knew him as likeable, sociable, simple, humble, generous, honest, kind, intelligent, ordered, courageous, prayerful, zealous, and hardworking. His fellow Christian Brothers dubbed him a “common, good guy,” “very human,” “a man of union and communion,” who had the “gift of gab,” a perpetual smile, a “deep faith and love for his religious vocation,” and a contagious, boisterous guffaw. He also, they noted, was perpetually “late to class and community prayers,” something that Cardinal José Luis Lacunza of Panama, presiding over his beatification, joked had prepared him very well for service in Latin America, “where punctuality is not numbered among our virtues!” His first assignment was to teach Spanish, English and religion for a few years at Cretin High School in St. Paul, Minnesota. While there, he supervised the maintenance of the school, earning the nickname “Brother Fix-It.” He also coached football, a sport at which, at 6’2” and 220 pounds, he was prone to excel. In 1969, after a fellow Christian Brother got sick at the Brothers’ school in Bluefield, Nicaragua, “Hermano Santiago” was sent to replace him. For four-plus years, he taught sixth grade, then high school, while also repairing the residence, running a bookstore and starting a soccer team. In 1974, Brother James was transferred to Puerto Cabezas where, as director of the school, he catalyzed an increase of enrollment from 300 to 800 students, helped build an industrial arts complex, offices, an auditorium and science center, taught, founded a volunteer fire department and served as janitor, fixing the plumbing, cleaning the bathrooms and sweeping the floor. His practical know-how won the attention of the Somoza Government, who contracted him to build ten more schools in the rural region so that the children of the area would have a chance at an education. When the Sandinistas took over the country, because of his having erected schools for the Somoza government and his general work of education and care for the human dignity of people long neglected, he was put on a list of those to be “dealt with.” His superiors therefore decided to summon him back to Cretin High School in Minnesota. He feared that the people of Puerto Cabezas would see his departure as an act of cowardice and so he wrote them telling them he would return, but he never got his wish. After two years of trying to return to Latin America, his superiors sent him to their Mission in Huehuetenango, Guatemala, to teach at the Indigenous House School and work at the Indian Center, training indigenous Mayans in agricultural techniques, leadership skills and basic educational subjects. St. Jean Baptiste de la Salle had told his spiritual sons, “Your zeal must go so far that you are ready to give your life, so dear to you are the children entrusted to you,” and Hermano Santiago took his founder’s instruction to heart. His new assignment was as dangerous as the one in Nicaragua. The Guatemalan government regularly conscripted indigenous students, even though they were exempt by law, into service. The government resented the Christian Brothers’ constantly appearing to present documentation to liberate their students. Word quickly spread that members of the G-2 death squad were looking for the “sub-director,” Brother James’ office at the school. He well knew the danger, but responded with humor, realism and faith. When asked if he were afraid, he replied, “Are you kidding? I never thought I could pray with such fervor when I go to bed!” He wrote his sister a month before he died, “One of two frightening things could happen to me in Guatemala: I could be kidnapped, tortured and killed or I could simply be gunned down.” He added, however, “You don’t think about that, that’s not why you’re there. There’s too much to be done. You can’t waste your energies worrying about what might happen. If it happens, it happens.” He insisted, “I pray to God for the grace and strength to serve Him faithfully among the poor and oppressed in Guatemala. I place my life in His Providence. I place my trust in Him.” On Saturday, February 13, 1982, after returning with students from a picnic, Brother Fix-It mounted a ladder to repair a broken lamp on the outer wall of the school. At 4:15 pm, four hooded men, whom the government would later call “subversive criminal elements,” sped past in a car with windows down and submachine guns loaded. They shot Hermano Santiago seven times in the neck and chest, as shocked children looked on from a window in the school. He fell from the ladder, dead. His funeral was held first in Huehuetenango and then in St. Paul, Minnesota, before he was buried in Ellis, Wisconsin, at a cemetery just outside the family farm. At his beatification on the Huehuetenango soccer field, Cardinal Lacunza called him a “martyr, an excellent educator and an evangelical defender of the poor and oppressed” who “made himself one of us and for us gave his life.” He suggested that Hermano Santiago died in witness of Christ’s great commission to teach all nations and was an icon of Christ the Teacher who died to give witness to the truth. “There is nothing that bothers totalitarianisms … more than education,” Lacunza said, since the greatest way to ensure that people remain docile to manipulation is by keeping them “ignorant, without criteria or values.” If education is subversive to tyrants, the Gospel is even more of a threat. One of the Christian brothers who had known Blessed James throughout his religious life said he loved to do things “very quietly, behind the scenes” — like leaven — and “never asked for recognition.” Now, all he did is in the foreground, with his having received the most important acknowledgment a human being can. His beatification shows that the Lord continues to exalt the humble. It also shows that the greatest in the kingdom of heaven remain those who keep the faith and teach others to do the same. He persevered until the end, fought the good fight, finished the race and kept the faith — and he trained not only his students but the whole Church to do the same.
• Blessed James shows us the meaning of today’s Psalm, “Blessed the Man whom you instruct, O Lord,” and he sought to pass on that saving instruction to others, at the risk of his life. We ask the Jesus who is with us in the boat of the Church and is about to implant himself in us as the most powerful leaven of all, himself, to help us become, not like the Pharisees or the Herodians or the Sadducees, but like him, Blessed James and the blessed whom he instructs and who glorify him.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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