The Little Way of Living with God-with-us, 26th Tuesday (I), October 1, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Chapel of the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See to the UN
Tuesday of the 26th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face
Renewal of Vows of Mother Teodora, Sister Lourdes and Sister Elsa, MCST
October 1, 2019
Zec 8:20-23, Ps 87, Lk 9:51-56

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today we come to the fulcrum of the Gospel of St. Luke, when he tells us that Jesus “resolutely determined to journey to Jerusalem.” Literally in the Greek it means that he fixed his face on Jerusalem and began the journey up to the place where he would offer his life on the Cross for us all and complete his salvific mission. It would be there that Jesus would ultimately fulfill the prophecies announced by Zechariah after the exile. It would be to Jesus, the true temple destroyed and rebuilt in three days, to Jesus on the Cross, that people from different cities would say, “Come, let us go to implore the favor of the Lord,” “I, too, will go to seek the Lord, and “Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.” It would there, on Calvary, that the refrain for the Responsorial Psalm today, “God is with us,” would take on new, salvific meaning.
• But before he would do that, he was going to try to include the Samaritans in that saving mission. He had already been to Samaria before, where he met the woman at the well. The end of that scene had the Samaritans all exclaiming in Sychar around the well of Jacob, “We have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the savior of the world.” But because Jesus was planning to head on to Jerusalem, with whom the Samaritans had been in a theological war for centuries, “they would not welcome him.” They put their disagreement with the Jews above their receiving their Savior. And when the Boanerges brothers — the Sons of Thunder, John and James — sought to call down fire from heaven on the Samaritans as God had once destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, we see that they, too, had taken their eyes off of Jerusalem and Jesus’ salvific will. So Jesus, rather than rebuking the Samaritans (which he easily could have), rebuked James and John. The failure of both the Samaritans and the sons of Zebedee teaches us a valuable lessons: many times we can put our own grievances, our own petty scores to settle, above God and the work of salvation he wants to accomplish. We can take our eyes off of Jesus and off of where Jesus has set his eyes. We can put conditions on God’s saving work, like the Samaritans tried: “We’ll allow you, the Savior of the World, to enter our village provided that you promise that you won’t go to Jerusalem!” Even though all of us recognize how silly it is when the Samaritans of yesteryear do it, we need to become more conscious of the way we likewise refuse welcoming Jesus. We see it when we refuse the Cross, like St. Peter and the apostles initially did when they reprimanded Jesus after he said that he would be betrayed in Jerusalem, suffer at the hands of the religious and civil leaders, be beaten, scourged and murdered. Still today many do not want to embrace Jesus’ determined vision about the way he wishes to be with us, united with us on the path of sacrificial love we call the way of the Cross. They seek Christ without the Cross, a Christianity without suffering, The Cross remains a scandal and a folly for many today, just as it was for many at the time of the apostles. What happened in Samaria in today’s Gospel is simply one more illustration of what St. John described in the prologue to his Gospel, that Jesus “came to his own and his own received him not.”
• The positive moral of the story is to keep our eyes fixed on what Jesus wants, and not to become so distracted by others rejecting Jesus that we in fact do the same.
• Someone who kept her eyes fixed on Jesus all the way and followed him to Calvary and through Calvary to heaven is the great saint we celebrate today, St. Therese Lisieux. When she was searching for what her vocation was, she saw that it was to be love in the heart of the Church her mother. That was not some vague sentimentalism, but it was to enter into Christ’s sacrificial love shown for us on the Cross, all that led to it, and all that flowed from it. St. Therese’s way of spiritual childhood encompasses this path of love and trust that we see in Jesus upon the Cross. It’s an entrance into Jesus’ own filiation, his own trust in the Father’s goodness, his own entrusting of his soul and all he was to the Father.
• When you look at St. Therese’s poetry you see just how central sharing Christ’s love on the Cross is to all that she teaches us as a doctor of the Church. We can focus on parts of four different poems that will help us to ponder her theology of the Cross and how this is the path to eternal exaltation.
  • In the first poem, she writes: “To live of love, ’tis not to fix one’s tent / On Tabor’s height and there with Thee remain. / ‘Tis to climb Calvary with strength nigh spent. / And count Thy heavy cross our truest gain.” Living by love means not to build booths to keep the consolation of the Transfiguration, in other words, but to enter with Jesus on Calvary and build our booth together with Jesus on the Cross. She continues, ” In heaven, my life a life of joy shall be / The heavy cross shall then be gone for aye. / Here upon earth, in suffering with Thee, Love! let me stay.” She begs to stay with Jesus in this crucified love in order to enter into Jesus’ eternal joy.
  • In the second poem, she stressed her desire to be crucified to the world to share in Jesus’ saving will. “I long for suffering; and the cross / With strong desire my heart doth crave. / A thousand deaths were gain, not loss, / If but one soul I help to save!” In the mosaics of the Crypt chapel in Lisieux where she is buried, there’s the expression that she recognized as a young novice, “To love is to give all, it’s to give oneself.” She made that self-gift, holding nothing back, and wants to help and encourage us to do the same.
  • In her third poem, she builds on this notion to desire and love the Cross, because one desires and loves what Jesus loves. “Remember Thou that amorous complaint / Escaping from Thy lips on Calvary’s tree: / ‘I thirst!’ Oh, how my heart like Thine doth faint. / Yes, yes! I share Thy burning thirst with Thee. / The more my heart burns bright with Thy great Heart’s chaste fires, / The more I thirst for souls, to quench Thy Heart’s desires./ That with such love always I burn, by night, by day. Remember Thou!” She thirsted for what Jesus thirsts, which is the salvation of every person. That was what burned her insides, to share that love. Likewise, with us, we need to begin with a love, with a hunger, for God so strong that it makes us want we he wants and makes us capable, by his grace, of sacrificing for it as we see so often with the martyrs.
  • In the last poem, St. Therese teaches us very practically how to walk this way of the Cross.  “O Jesu! O my Love! Each eve I come to fling / Before Thy sacred Cross sweet flowers of all the year. By these plucked petals bright, my hands how gladly bring, I long to dry Thine every tear! To scatter flowers! — that means each sacrifice, / My lightest sighs and pains, my heaviest, saddest hours, / My hopes, my joys, my prayers, — I will not count the price. / Behold my flowers! / With deep, untold delight Thy beauty fills my soul. / Would I might light this love in hearts of all who live! / For this, my fairest flowers, all things in my control, How fondly, gladly I would give! / To scatter flowers! — behold my chosen sword / For saving sinners’ souls and filling heaven’s bowers. / The victory is mine: yes, I disarm Thee, Lord, With these my flowers!” Everything in her day she treated as a flower with which she would adorn Jesus with love on the Cross. All the little sacrifices of every day could be sanctified as an act of love, and that’s what she tried to do. That’s what she’d like to help us try to do.
• Today we have the privilege to witness the renewal of vows of three Missionary Catechists of Saint Therese of the Infant Jesus, Mother Teodora, Sister Lourdes and Sister Elsa. They will renew today the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. For St. Therese, the vow of poverty was a means by which she could attach herself to Jesus as her true wealth; of chastity to Jesus as her true love; of obedience to Jesus’ will as her own. All three were part of her vocation to be love in the heart of the Church. Through poverty, chastity and obedience, one is made capable of crucifying the selfish desires for money, sex and control so that one can actually give oneself away in love. Each is a means by which those who make these vows can fix their face firmly on Jesus’ Holy Face on Calvary and learn how to follow him to the fulfillment of love. We pray today for them that they, like St. Therese, might come to the fulfillment of their vows, and deeper communion with the Poor, Chaste and Obedient Christ as they prepare to be united with him, as we do, in Holy Communion.
• To set our face on Jerusalem, on Calvary, on the Cross, is all about love, a love we’re supposed to embrace and a love we’re supposed to proclaim. The way St. Therese grew in cruciform love most was not just through the physical sufferings she endured with terrible tuberculosis at the end of her life and an unexplained lengthy illness at the beginning of her life. It wasn’t just through the death of her mother at the age of four and her father’s getting dementia at the end of his. It wasn’t merely through the dark night of the soul that tormented her over the last couple of years of her existence. It was mostly through the Mass. This is where the love of God, shown for us on the Cross, became real. Every day at Mass, she was able to say, in the words of Zechariah the Prophet today, “Come! let us go to implore the favor of the Lord” and, “I too will go to seek the Lord.” This is where God is with us. This is where we behold the Lamb of God, the Savior of the World, who can’t keep his eyes off of us. Let us ask him as we prepare to receive his Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, to give us his eyes, so that we might keep our eyes always on the target he has set and on the Father in heaven, where we hope, with St. Therese, to behold him always in the beatific vision!

The readings for today’s Mass were: