Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the 22nd Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Votive Mass for the Sanctification of Human Work
September 2, 2019
1 Thes 4:13-18, Ps 96, Lk 4:16-30
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
The following points were attempted in the homily:
- Since the 1880s, Americans have marked Labor Day on the first Monday in September, in order to celebrate the hard work of Americans in making this country prosperous and strong and, according to the original Presidential proclamation, to have the time to attend speeches and events on the spiritual and education aspects of human work not only for the building up of our country, but also for building us and others up in God’s plan. While many treat it just as the last day of a summer vacation, we can use it to ponder the spiritual aspect of work as we all get ready for increased work at the end of the summer.
- We see that the vocation to work was given to us by God at the beginning, prior to the Fall, in order to cooperate with him in bring the gift of his creative work to perfection. In Genesis God specified three types of work: filling the earth and subduing it, bringing out all the potential he had put into creation; sharing in his dominion over the birds of the air, the fish of the sea and all the creatures who walk on earth; and increasing and multiplying, collaborating with him in bringing new creatures made in his image and likeness, and in their parents image and likeness, to life. In this three-fold work, not only would we be doing something, but would be forming someone, namely ourselves, more and more in the image of God whom Jesus revealed as “working still” (Jn 5:17). Work has, as St. John Paul II used to say, a transitive and intransitive fruit, a facere and an agere, to use the two complementary Latin words for work, to show that when we work we not only make something but build ourselves up. God created us with this vocation to work in his image and then gave us the command to rest in his image on the Sabbath, in order to give us the chance with him to rejoice in the work done and to make sure that all of it remains connected to our relationship with Him. Labor Day is like an annual secular Sabbath in which we’re called to do this reflection and revivify this connection. When God gave us the commandment to keep holy the Sabbath Day he said he was doing “because you were once slaves in Egypt.” The Sabbath is meant to help us to do our work not as slaves but as sons, as collaborators in the family business, and Labor Day is an opportunity for all of us to ponder more deeply what is our family business.
- Our vocation to work wasn’t eliminated by the Fall, but it was changed by it. After original sin, our three-fold work would become arduous, tilling and subduing the earth would become toilsome and sweaty, childbirth would become painful, dominion over other animals would be contested and dangerous. Our vocation would remain, but it would become transformed as part of the redemption, the means by which we would cooperate with the Lord in repairing the damage due to sin through perfecting us in love. The love of mother for a child such that she would endure so much not only in childbirth but in child-rearing would become part of her restoration in love. The love of a dad in toiling in the fields would become a means by which he expresses his capacity to lay down his life to provide for his children. Work well done, in short, would become a means of our cooperation with Jesus in his redeeming work.
- It’s not by coincidence that Jesus spent over 90 percent of his salvific life on earth sharing in ordinary human work. His fellow Nazarenes knew him as a “tekton” which is normally translated as “carpenter” but is better translated as a “construction worker” or even as “architect” who designs and executes a building project. Following his foster-father, Jesus entered into the world of human work. He built houses, made tables and wheels and produced scores of other items people needed for life and their own work. He did this not as a “cover” until his “real work” would begin, but precisely to redeem noble human labor in his process of redeeming the human person. The early saints taught that whatever Jesus didn’t assume he didn’t redeem, and he assumed our human work in order that we might be able through our work to participate in the work of redemption.
- So great is the importance of human work in God’s plan of redemption that Jesus the tekton could not stop using it as an analogy for the kingdom he had come from heaven to earth to build. Jesus mentions and generally praises the work of shepherds, farmers, doctors, sowers, householders, servants, stewards, merchants, laborers, soldiers, cooks, tax collectors, scholars and moms. He tells to pray to the Lord of the Harvest to send not “bodies” for his fields, but “laborers,” those who know how to roll up their sleeves and work hard, to work with an urgency, knowing that the fields are so ripe they’re white for the harvest. And we see that just after he got the disciples to pray in such a way to the Harvest Master he called twelve of them to become those very laborers. And he has never ceased to communicate to us that he is likewise calling us not just to pray to the Harvest Master for laborers but to grasp that he’s calling us all to say yes to the Father’s response to that prayer: his calling us, in one way or the other, to share in that work. The Harvest Master indeed, Jesus reminds us elsewhere in a parable, never ceases to summon us to help him in his fields, going out at dawn, at 9 am, a noon, at 3 pm and again at 5 pm, desirous of giving us all a full life’s wage for those efforts. It’s noteworthy that for his first apostles, he didn’t choose rabbinical scholars, members of the Sanhedrin, Levites, or the all-stars or even benchwarmers among the scribes and Pharisees. Instead he chose four fishermen, those who knew what it was like to work all night to try to catch fish, those who were capable of rising above the discouragement of having toiled all night and caught nothing only to go out anew, those who were courageous and capable of being out on the deep, even when there was a chance for a storm. Jesus calls us all to be courageous, resilient, hard workers in this way.
- The readings the Church gives us today help us to ponder in a deeper way Christ’s own saving work and the way we’re called to share in it.
- In the Gospel, Jesus announced to the people alongside whom he has worked for decades, the fulfillment of the salvific work he had come into the world to accomplish. He reads Isaiah’s prophecy about the work the Messiah would accomplish and says, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
- The first is with regard to grieving the death of our loved ones and other forms of grieving. Today St. Paul tells the truth about the last things to the Thessalonians so that they don’t grieve like all the others do who grieve without hope. We are to think about death from within the context of hope in Jesus’ promises. There are two points here. The first is to grieve. Some Christians today don’t grieve, some even confess it, because they’re basically taught that death is a canonization, funerals are celebrated with white, certain clerics guarantee that no matter how one lived or died the person is in a “better place,” and they’re not given permission to grieve. Others go to the opposite extreme, and grieve as if they’ve lost the most important thing in life, they wear black for the rest of their life and define themselves from that point forward by the death of a loved one. The way God wants us to look at things is to grieve because we love and our life on earth won’t be the same as before, but to mourn in such a way that we believe in God’s mercy and hope that we will be together with our loved one again. What goes for grieving the death of our loved ones similarly goes for other types of grief, like when we lose something else valuable. We can grieve the loss of a job or assignment. We can grieve when we’re transferred someplace else apart from one of our good friends or our family, or one of our friends or family members moves far away from us. We can grieve when someone discerns out of consecrated life. We can grieve when we don’t get the assignment we’re hoping for or don’t get relieved of one we treated as a burden. There are many forms of grief. But in all of them we’re called to grieve with hope. St. Paul basically defines hope as “living with God in the world,” because hopelessness for him is living without God in the world (Eph 4:10). To grieve with hope is to grief with Christ, who blesses those who mourn (with him) because they will be consoled. All of us are called to show the Church and the world how to grieve in this way so that they two can be renewed by the renewal of their mind and think as God thinks.
- After Jesus had read the scroll of the Prophet Isaiah about the work of the long-awaited Messiah (Is 61), Jesus said, “Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.” He was the fulfillment of the one anointed by the Spirit who was announcing and delivering the Good News to the poor, freedom to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, release to the oppressed, and a year of Jubilee. We will see in St. Luke’s Gospel how Jesus in a string of miracles to follow accomplishes all of these works and more. But the greatest work was the fulfillment of his promise to save us and that leads us to the culmination of his life in his passion, death and resurrection, of which we get a foretaste in today’s Gospel. Initially, those in Nazareth recognized that Jesus was speaking with “gracious words” but they couldn’t harmonize that with the fact that he was the supposed son of Joseph the carpenter. And their amazement soon passed to doubt and then to homicidal anger as they sought to kill him. His enfleshment of the word and plans of God was a scandal to them, they didn’t think that one of their own could be the Messiah, they didn’t want to get shaken out of their own habits to examine whether it was true and if so to follow him, and therefore they sought to reject the message by killing the messenger. But this would be the fulfillment of many of the other descriptions of the Messiah as Suffering Servant. Jesus wants to incorporate us into that saving work.
- We do that, of course, through our own work, but we also do it through our own suffering and death. That’s why today’s first reading, from St. Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians, is important. Death is not a contradiction to God’s saving work in us, but a means by which it can come to fulfillment. That’s why St. Paul tells us that we Christians will of course grieve, but we mourn differently than the rest, because we grieve with hope because we know of the work Christ does in us by incorporating us into his own death and resurrection in baptism, through the work of love, and through our own entrustment to him at the hour of death. Today we pray in a special way for all those who have worked to support us, both our parents, our families, our benefactors, and all those who have built up the Church.
- As we celebrate this Mass for the Sanctification of Human Labor we remember that the Mass itself is a combination between God’s work and ours, symbolized by the prayers of the offertory when we thank God for the “fruit of the earth” and “fruit of the vine” but also for the “work of human hands” that converts grain into bread and grapes into wine. That’s a symbol of the pleasing sacrifice of Abel that we’re called to bring with us each day to the altar, something that prepares us much better to allow Jesus to continue to do his divine work of salvation in us and through us. Today a diligent construction worker from Nazareth with calloused hands bids us to “Come, follow me!” to this altar, where he wishes to strengthen us so that he may send us out to proclaim his Gospel not just by words but by our work. We pray that at the end of today, as we examine our conscience before him, we might be able to echo his words in Nazareth and say honestly, “Today, this Scripture about the importance of work has been fulfilled in me.”
The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 1 THES 4:13-18
We do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters,
about those who have fallen asleep,
so that you may not grieve like the rest, who have no hope.
For if we believe that Jesus died and rose,
so too will God, through Jesus,
bring with him those who have fallen asleep.
Indeed, we tell you this, on the word of the Lord,
that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord,
will surely not precede those who have fallen asleep.
For the Lord himself, with a word of command,
with the voice of an archangel and with the trumpet of God,
will come down from heaven,
and the dead in Christ will rise first.
Then we who are alive, who are left,
will be caught up together with them in the clouds
to meet the Lord in the air.
Thus we shall always be with the Lord.
Therefore, console one another with these words.
Responsorial Psalm PS 96:1 AND 3, 4-5, 11-12, 13
R. (13b) The Lord comes to judge the earth.
Sing to the LORD a new song;
sing to the LORD, all you lands.
Tell his glory among the nations;
among all peoples, his wondrous deeds.
R. The Lord comes to judge the earth.
For great is the LORD and highly to be praised;
awesome is he, beyond all gods.
For all the gods of the nations are things of nought,
but the LORD made the heavens.
R. The Lord comes to judge the earth.
Let the heavens be glad and the earth rejoice;
let the sea and what fills it resound;
let the plains be joyful and all that is in them!
Then shall all the trees of the forest exult.
R. The Lord comes to judge the earth.
Before the LORD, for he comes;
for he comes to rule the earth.
He shall rule the world with justice
and the peoples with his constancy.
R. The Lord comes to judge the earth.
Alleluia SEE LK 4:18
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me;
he has sent me to bring glad tidings to the poor.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel LK 4:16-30
Jesus came to Nazareth, where he had grown up,
and went according to his custom
into the synagogue on the sabbath day.
He stood up to read and was handed a scroll of the prophet Isaiah.
He unrolled the scroll and found the passage where it was written:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring glad tidings to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.
Rolling up the scroll,
he handed it back to the attendant and sat down,
and the eyes of all in the synagogue looked intently at him.
He said to them,
“Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.”
And all spoke highly of him
and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.
They also asked, “Is this not the son of Joseph?”
He said to them, “Surely you will quote me this proverb,
‘Physician, cure yourself,’ and say, ‘Do here in your native place
the things that we heard were done in Capernaum.’”
And he said,
“Amen, I say to you, no prophet is accepted in his own native place.
Indeed, I tell you,
there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah
when the sky was closed for three and a half years
and a severe famine spread over the entire land.
It was to none of these that Elijah was sent,
but only to a widow in Zarephath in the land of Sidon.
Again, there were many lepers in Israel
during the time of Elisha the prophet;
yet not one of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.”
When the people in the synagogue heard this,
they were all filled with fury.
They rose up, drove him out of the town,
and led him to the brow of the hill
on which their town had been built, to hurl him down headlong.
But he passed through the midst of them and went away.
