The Mercy God Dispenses and Desires, 15th Friday (II), July 17, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Friday of the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass of the Sacred Heart
July 17, 2020
Is 38:1-8.21-22, Is 38, Mt 12:1-8

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

The following points were attempted in this homily: 

• As we celebrate today a votive Mass of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the readings today help us to ponder God’s great mercy that is at the essence of the revelation of the Sacred Heart and how he wants our hearts to be truly “misericors” as well, moved with loving compassion. Today Jesus says in the Gospel, “It is mercy I desire, not sacrifice.” This is not the first time he’s said those words. We remember that after Jesus called St. Matthew to conversion and the former tax collector threw a party for all of his fellow sinners to encounter Jesus, the Pharisees complained that Jesus was associating with sinners. Jesus replied that he had come to call sinners, not the self-righteous, and that it is the sick who need a doctor not those who think they’re fine. Then he said, referring to the prophet Hosea, “Go and learn the meaning of the phrase, “It is mercy I desire, not sacrifice.” In repeating that phrase today, Jesus shows just how central it is for what he teaches and enfleshes: everything God does in his relationship with us can be summarized as an expression of his merciful love, and he so wants to transform us that we can become merciful like he is merciful.
• The setting in the Gospel takes place because the Scribes and Pharisees had lost the center for the peripheries, the one thing necessary for so many other things. After the Babylonian Captivity the Jews realized — accurately — that the reason for their exile was because they had been unfaithful to God’s law, and in an excess of precaution began to become so obsessed about the little details of the law that they missed the forest for the trees, they missed the Legislator because of the legislation. The class of scribes, the scholars of the law, arose in order to study every word, and then, in order to prevent Jews from violating it, began, as many scholars like to analogize, draw fences around the law so that they wouldn’t possibly violate it. With regard to the Sabbath, if the point of the Sabbath was to keep it holy, to keep it as a day of freedom apart from enslaving work, then they would make all types of regulations so that they wouldn’t get anywhere close to violating it. So they determined in minutiae what would be the minimalist form of work and invented rules that many Jews began to take as seriously as the commandments. For example, they said that on the Sabbath you couldn’t lift anything that would weigh more than two dry figs, they described how far you could walk, they said that you couldn’t prepare food, and so on. They had totally missed the point of the commandment! Rather than a gift of God giving us a chance to set the reset button in our relationship with him and others, rather than a day of love and freedom, it became a day of a more intense form of slavery. That’s one of the most important things that Jesus came to fix.
• Today we begin the Twelfth Chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel which is all about Jesus’ bringing the Sabbath back to its original meaning and how that would get the Scribes and Pharisees — those who assiduously studied the Word of God and committed themselves to living it to the letter — to begin plotting to kill him. The violated the Fifth Commandment in order to fulfill, they thought, the Third! As we’ll see, his critics will go from observing and confronting him in today’s Gospel, to observing whether he’d heal — do an act of love — to plotting to kill him, to persecution. Today Jesus is walking through the fields of grain with the disciples on the Sabbath. They were hungry because they really hadn’t eaten anything. So they plucked the heads of grain and began to eat what it. In doing so, it’s important to state, they weren’t stealing because Deuteronomy explicitly gave those who were traveling the right to do this (Deut 23:26). But in order to eat the grain, they needed to pluck it, winnow and thresh it in their hands, and then eat it, and it was this type of minimal work in order to eat that the Scribes and Pharisees said was contrary to God’s will, as if God were glorified by his sons’ starving on the Lord’s day. Jesus defended his disciples, and showed their erroneous interpretation, by two references to Sacred Scripture. The first was what David did with his troops as they were serving the Lord and had nothing to eat. They entered the temple area and ate the showbread — the bread that was symbolically placed in the Temple before the Lord for a week until it was replaced and the priests would eat it. Jesus was saying that there was a higher principle involved and that there was no sin in David because what was eaten was to strengthen them to do the Lord’s work. Likewise he pointed out to the work that the Temple priests do on the Sabbath, lighting candles, burning incense, dealing with sacrificed animals, and it’s clear that they were not violating the Sabbath by doing this work that was part of their praise and homage to God. Jesus was emphasizing that he and his disciples were glorifying God by doing what they were doing, not sinning against Him. Jesus had just finished calling those who were burdened to come to him to be refreshed and he was giving that refreshment, something that the Sabbath was intended to do, to remake us according to God’s image in love. Jesus stressed that the entirety of the law, that the practice of the faith, was meant to be transformative, to change us to become more and more like God. That’s the whole point of the Sabbath. And the point of the law, as God would tell us most clearly through Hosea above all, was mercy. Mercy is so much more valuable than the sacrifice of animals, because God is merciful and wants us, in receiving his mercy, to share it. Jesus was stressing that his critics had no mercy whatsoever toward the “innocent men” who had become his followers.
• This is an important principle for all of us. The initial training God gives us in faith is meant to become so much a part of us that we can pass with God to the essence of everything for which he gave us those foundations. Altar boys are trained in the minutiae of what they’re supposed to do not so that at the end they’re obsessing about cruets, or incense, or how they’re folding their hands, but so that they can pray what they’re doing and inspire others by their prayerful discipline. All of us are trained in what to do during Mass, from taking holy water and blessing us to genuflecting, blessing ourselves before the Gospel, kneeling, standing, processing, and so forth not so that we can stay at the level of those gestures, but really love God and others through them. There is an issue that many times we, like the ancient Scribes and Pharisees, can remain at the level of rubrics rather than pass from the sign to the signified. We can see someone fail to genuflect and wonder what’s wrong with the person rather than be glad the person has come into the presence of the Lord and might even not be a Catholic and doesn’t know what to do in Church. I remember once when I had started to celebrate the Extraordinary Form of the Mass in New Bedford that I was visited by a woman after Mass flabbergasted that the “novus ordo” Catholics in attendance were standing at the beginning of the Alleluia rather than at the “Dominus vobiscum” after the Alleluia. She was paying attention more concerned to that that than the very meaning of the Gospel. For those of us in the priesthood or the religious life, we can sometimes become so narrowly focused on smaller aspects of the rule and customs, and upset at someone not taking care, for example, of the way to fold napkins, then we can really identify lovingly with the person using the napkin. Seminary and the novitiate are times in which we’re trained in lots of particular things but they’re meant to pass into a life in which, with good ingrained habits, we’re able to live fully according to the way the priestly life or a religious charism incarnates the greatest commandment and the one like it (love of God and neighbor with all we are and have). The whole point of divine pedagogy is to help the disciple become like the Teacher, the slave like the Master, the son or daughter like the Father. The little things are important in terms of our training, but they are meant to be ingredients in a much bigger offering to the Lord, means rather than ends in themselves.
• We see the Lord’s will of mercy very clearly displayed in today’s first reading. King Hezekiah was mortally ill and Isaiah came to him, saying on behalf of the Lord, “Put your house in order, for you are about to die; you shall not recover.” Hezekiah had been, overall, faithful descendant of David but who, like David, made some serious mistakes. He wasn’t trusting in the Lord with regard to the threat of the Assyrians. But he turned to the Lord, prayed, wept and lamented how he had faithfully and wholeheartedly served the Lord once. God then showed his mercy to Hezekiah by sending Isaiah to him and healing him, a sign in Hezekiah’s body that the Lord was forgiving him. Each of us, like Hezekiah, is called not only to put our house into order, but to keep the house in order, not taking for granted the Lord’s mercy, but availing ourselves of it in such a way that we are as transformed as Hezekiah was. And the house is in order when God’s mercy has transformed us to overflowing.
• Today at Mass Christ leads us not through fields of grain but into the heart of the Gospel. Here he seeks to add not 15 years to our life, but eternity. He doesn’t have us pick heads of grain, but gives us himself, transforming the fruit of the earth and the work of human hands into the only nourishment he deemed worthy of our soul. As the Son of David, he brings us into the house of God and has us consume his self-offering. Something greater than the Temple is here and he, in giving us body and blood shed, makes us into a temple. As we enter into his sacrifice, and bring here all of our sacrifices, he transforms them into a sacrifice of mercy and tells us, “Do this in memory of me.” The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath and of each day.

The readings for today’s Mass were:

Gospel MT 12:1-8

Jesus was going through a field of grain on the sabbath.
His disciples were hungry
and began to pick the heads of grain and eat them.
When the Pharisees saw this, they said to him,
“See, your disciples are doing what is unlawful to do on the sabbath.”
He said to the them, “Have you not read what David did
when he and his companions were hungry,
how he went into the house of God and ate the bread of offering,
which neither he nor his companions
but only the priests could lawfully eat?
Or have you not read in the law that on the sabbath
the priests serving in the temple violate the sabbath
and are innocent?
I say to you, something greater than the temple is here.
If you knew what this meant, I desire mercy, not sacrifice,
you would not have condemned these innocent men.
For the Son of Man is Lord of the sabbath.”

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