The Life-Changing Attraction of Jesus, 2nd Thursday (I), January 21, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Chapel of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Thursday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Agnes, Virgin and Martyr
January 21, 2021
Heb 7:25-8:6, Ps 40, Mk 3:7-12

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today in the Gospel we see something on which we can never focus enough: the great attractiveness of the Lord Jesus. St. Mark tells us that such a large crowd of people were following Jesus that he needed to have a boat ready to push a little bit away from the shore so that the people wouldn’t crush him. They were coming from Galilee, Judea, Jerusalem, Idumea, the Transjordan, Tyre and Sidon. For those who don’t know the geography of the Holy Land very well, those locations might just be names. But Galilee was in the north and Judea in the south of the Holy Land. Idumea was even further to the South. The Transjordan was the pagan inhabited region on the eastern side of the Jordan River and Sea of Galilee. Tyre and Sidon were pagan cities way to the north along the Mediterranean. To get a sense of the message St. Mark was communicating it would be as if Jesus were here in Manhattan and that people were walking to see him from Maine, Connecticut and as far away as Washington, North Carolina, Portland, Maine and the Outer Long Island, and it wasn’t just Catholics coming but also atheists, secularists, and those of other religions. They were all pressing upon Jesus, who was curing and teaching. Even the demons couldn’t resist. When they saw him, they fell down before him — in other words, in begrudging adoration — and shouted, “You are the Son of God.”
• We need constantly to ask whether Jesus maintains this attraction for us and others. There are many today for whom Jesus has become a little like Abraham Lincoln, a revered figure of the past but not someone with whom one has a personal relationship. Just like many won’t make the sacrifice to go to Springfield, Illinois, or to the Lincoln Memorial in DC, so many won’t even make the effort to go to Church to spend an hour with him in adoration or, sometimes, even go to meet him at Mass. Many say they believe in him, but what they likely mean is that they believe he existed; they don’t really live by faith, committing themselves to him and being drawn fundamentally not by duty but by fascination, by love, by attraction. Those who are fascinated by Jesus will hunger for his word and become men and women whose lives are drenched by the daily dew of the Gospel. Those who are attracted by Jesus will come to him in adoration and say, as Samuel said on Sunday, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” Those who truly believe in what Jesus has said and done and who love him will seek to come to meet him at Mass every day they can and in confession to say sorry as often as they sin. Those who take Jesus seriously will, in union with him, go out as Good Samaritans to care for a wounded world. Jesus has never lost his attractiveness. He’s as attractive today as ever. But many times our lives, our hearts, our minds, are so saturated with worldly cares and anxieties, with lesser hopes, with false gods that we place first in our lives, that the type of wonder, fascination, love and attraction we’re supposed to have toward Jesus is extinguished partially or fully. Today is a great day to ponder anew the real person of Jesus who is alive in the Sacraments, who speaks to us in his Word and in prayer, who is present in his image in others, especially in the needy, and to make the effort — even the crazy effort of walking from our own Tyre or Idumea to the Sea of Galilee — to draw close to him.
• When we do, we will find something really startling and beautiful about the Jesus we meet. The Letter to the Hebrews describes this at the beginning of today’s first reading. “Jesus is always able to save those who approach God through him, since he lives forever to make intercession for them.” When we approach Jesus, he saves us. His entire life is one of intercession for us and our salvation. He took our nature to intercede for us and take our place on death row. He intercedes for us still. He prays for us. He seeks to help and guide us. For me one of the most powerful sentences in the Gospel is when Jesus, after declaring that Satan desires to sift all of the apostles like wheat, says to St. Peter, “But I have prayed for you (singular), Peter, that your faith may not fail, but after you have converted, you will strengthen your brothers” (Lk 22:31).  Jesus prayed for Peter personally and he let him know it. The same Jesus prays for us personally. The same Jesus intercedes for us personally. The same Jesus seeks to save each one of us and is willing to be crucified to do so. How can someone who loves us this much not be attractive!
• But the way that Jesus wants to save us is not without our participation. He wants to save us through transforming us from within to unite ourselves with him. As we’ve seen in our journey through the Letter to the Hebrews over the last ten days at daily Mass, Jesus wants to involve us in his own priesthood so that we can convert our entire life into a sacrifice of love for God and others. We see one of the high points of this priestly ministry and participative priestly union in a very important doctrinal part of today’s first reading. The Letter to the Hebrews says that Jesus “has no need, as did the high priests, to offer sacrifice day after day, first for his own sins and then for those of the people; he did that once for all when he offered himself.” Many fundamentalist Protestants attack Catholicism because they think we violate this passage. Jesus offered a sacrifice once and for all and we Catholics, they say, offer the sacrifice of the Mass, which we claim to be Jesus’ sacrifice from the Upper Room and Calvary, every single day. To them, this “proves” that our understanding of the Mass is flawed. But this is not, nor ever has been, the Church doctrine on the Mass. Catholics believe that Jesus offered his body and blood once and for all on Holy Thursday and Good Friday and that at Mass we enter into that one, eternal sacrifice offered for all. But today we’re not just repeating exactly what we did yesterday. Something important changes from Mass to Mass, namely the sacrifice we unite to Christ’s one eternal Sacrifice. Every Mass is different because of the offering we make in time together with Christ’s one eternal offering. At the offertory, the priest prays, “Pray, brethren, that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God, the Almighty Father.” This is a liturgical echo of St. Paul’s words, “I urge you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship” (Rom 12:1). We come to offer not just somethingbut our very selves to God as a living, holy, pleasing, spiritual sacrifice to the Father, united to Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary. We offer it as Christ’s Body united with the Head, as Christ’s Bride united in one flesh union with her Bridegroom. That’s what the Mass is, the offering of the whole Church together with Christ to the Father. Christ’s sacrifice doesn’t change, but ours does, each day. And Christ is interceding for us today to do so in such a way that our sacrifice will lead us to salvation by incorporating us into his own saving intercession.
• Someone who was captivated by the beauty of the Lord Jesus such that she wanted to offer her whole life in loving communion with Jesus’ loving self-offering to the Father is the great virgin martyr the Church celebrates today. St. Agnes was a beautiful 12 year old virgin, who had consecrated herself to the Lord, her “heavenly spouse,” as she called Jesus in the stories of her death. Men who wanted her for themselves couldn’t stand the fact that she belonged to someone else, even to the One she believed was God. If they couldn’t have her, they didn’t want anyone to have her. In fact, if they couldn’t have her, they wanted her dead. They outed her as a Christian during the ferocious anti-Christian persecution of the emperor Diocletian in 304. After the magistrate tried to frighten her through showing her various means of torture, she persevered. He sentenced her to a brothel so that people would destroy the beauty of her bodily consecration to the Lord, but the Lord miraculously protected her. Her martyrdom, as St. Ambrose once said, was simply an extension of the death to self out of love for God that characterized her chaste virginity: virginity is praiseworthy, he wrote, not because it is found in the virgin martyrs but because in makes the virgin martyrs. Her chaste love for the Lord in little things became the school of the training in courage that allowed her to remain faithful in love of the Lord and others while under the threat of torture and death. Her whole life became a Mass offered in communion with Christ, as bride and Bridegroom, as chaste body and crowned Head. Today on her feast day she teaches us how to be drawn by Jesus to unite ourselves to him in things big and small and to be saved by him!
• Today we don’t have to travel hundreds of miles to meet Jesus at a seashore. We haven’t come here from Tyre, Sidon, Jerusalem, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, and all across Judea and Galilee. We’ve come from far closer, but the Lord is hoping to see the same interior willingness to climb over mountains and valleys to come to him and enter into his prayer and life. That’s what we do today. We press upon him. We draw near. And we ask his intercession for us to become, like St. Agnes, his total cooperators as we rejoice in the fulfillment of that “more excellent ministry,” better covenant,” and “better promises.”

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Gospel Mk 3:7-12

Jesus withdrew toward the sea with his disciples.
A large number of people followed from Galilee and from Judea.
Hearing what he was doing,
a large number of people came to him also from Jerusalem,
from Idumea, from beyond the Jordan,
and from the neighborhood of Tyre and Sidon.
He told his disciples to have a boat ready for him because of the crowd,
so that they would not crush him.
He had cured many and, as a result, those who had diseases
were pressing upon him to touch him.
And whenever unclean spirits saw him they would fall down before him
and shout, “You are the Son of God.”
He warned them sternly not to make him known.

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