The Mission of Charity Christ Entrusted to Mother Teresa and to Us, 23rd Monday (II), September 5, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, New York
Monday of the 23rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta (25th Anniversary of her death and birth into eternal life)
September 5, 2022
1 Cor 5:8, Ps 5, Lk 6:6-11

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

The following text guided today’s homily: 

• Jesus’ mission was not just to save and sanctify but to revolutionize, to turn right side up, the way his people had distorted religion, to give us new wineskins to receive new wine. This distortion was epitomized by the way many of the Scribes and Pharisees treated the Sabbath, making it a day of extraordinary rules about everything they couldn’t do, rather than a day of loving God with all they had and loving their neighbor. In today’s Gospel the Scribes and the Pharisees went to the Synagogue on the Sabbath, but they really weren’t going for that reason. St. Luke tells us that their main focus was to “watch Jesus closely to see if he would cure on the Sabbath so that they might discover a reason to accuse him.” The suffering of the man with the withered hand didn’t matter much to them. On this Labor Day in the USA, we can note that St. Luke’s term for this man’s hand was that it had “dried up”: in other words, it had once had life in it but no longer did. One of the apocryphal Gospels said that the man was a mason who had been injured on the job and could no longer work and support himself and his family. But the injured laborer’s plight didn’t concern the Pharisees at all. Even though they would rescue an animal from a trap on a Sabbath, they wouldn’t care for their fellow man, as if restoring him to health would somehow be offensive to God. So Jesus, reading their hearts, asked the question: “Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath rather than to do evil, to save life rather than to destroy it?” It was a poignant question because he was intending to do good and to save life, and they were intending to do evil and destroy life. What Jesus was doing they somehow found objectionable, but what they were doing — trying to prevent Jesus’ doing good and then conspiring to plot his demise — was somehow licit, even on the Lord’s Day. They didn’t answer Jesus’ question for obvious reasons.
• Jesus then worked his miracle of mercy, not only to do good to the man with the withered hand and restore his livelihood but do good to his objectors and to all of us, by showing us the true meaning of the Sabbath and God’s desire to make us whole. He had the man with the injured hand come and stand before everyone, the first of the two steps of faith by which the man would cooperate in his own healing. Then he said to the man, in the second step of faith, “Stretch out your hand!” He was telling someone who hadn’t been able to move his hand for who-knows-how-long to make an act of the will and do the impossible. And St. Luke the beloved physician noted something beautiful: not “his hand was restored and he did so,” but, “he did so and his hand was restored.” He extended himself in faith and that was part of his restoration. As this man was stretching out his hand in response to Jesus’, we can, in a sense, imagine an act of recreation in which, reminiscent of Michelangelo’s scene of creation, God stretched forth his hand as his creature likewise did and it was in that action that the breath of life was given.
• As we celebrate today the feast of Saint Mother Teresa Calcutta and mark the 25th anniversary of her being called home by Christ, we recall how her 51 years as a Missionary of Charity were an extended commentary and continuation of the mercy we see from Jesus in today’s Gospel. She spent her life, together with her spiritual daughters, going out to rescue people from pits, to care for those with withered and leprous hands, to restore to dignity those who were treated like stray animals. She not only knew that it was lawful to do good and to save life but she took it as a command, seeing in every person in any way withered Christ in a distressing disguise, the only worthy response to whom was love. Jesus worked the miracle in today’s Gospel not only on the Sabbath but in a synagogue to show that he had come as Messiah to rehabilitate the meaning of worship, to show us that to love God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength involves loving our neighbor as he loves them. Mother Teresa always grasped that there was a connection between her worship of God and her reverence of others: she said often that the same Jesus who says “This is my Body,” and “This is the chalice of my Blood,” is the one who says, “I was sick and you cared for me.” And care for Christ she did and for all those Christ loved enough to die for, so that they may live. The new worship Christ came to inaugurate involves this union between faith and life, between what we believe and what we do. Our worship of the God of love is meant to transform us more and more into his image so that all of us may make our lives living exegeses of St. Paul’s phrase, “caritas Christi urget nos,” the love of Christ — both subjectively and objectively — compels us (2 Cor 5:14).
• But that’s the big question on which the meaning of our life hinges: Does Christ’s love really compel us? Is our passion for God something that transform the way we treat everyone else? Do we see that the way we treat the least among us is the way we treat the Lord (Mt 25:31-46)? Do we grasp that whenever we receive someone in Christ’s name, even a child who was insignificant at the time of Christ, we receive the Lord himself? Does Christ’s mission of charity toward us change us in such a way that we, too, become missionaries of charity?
• These thoughts are very relevant for us to understand what was happening in today’s first reading from St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. He had been told that it was now widely known that among the Church in Corinth there was “an immorality of a kind not found even among pagans,” an incestuous relationship in which a man was in a relationship with his own stepmother. That was problem enough. But the bigger problem, St. Paul says, was that they were “inflated with pride” whereas they should “have been sorrowful.” Rather than being ashamed, rather than mourning the offense against God, the damage being done to both the man and his step-mother, and the scandal that was now widely reported, they responded with proud neglect, as if that sin really didn’t impact them. In Corinth, there was so much debauchery among the general population that even the Christians had become used to it, and not only were they not properly scandalized, but they also didn’t love their brother enough to do anything about it. Like the Pharisees’ callous heedlessness of the man with a withered hand, they were indifferent to their fellow believer with the withered soul. They were the ancient version of those who were “personally opposed, but” crowd who would never involve themselves in incestuous relations but who would go on with life as normal despite the rotting souls of those who would come to worship with them on the Christian Sabbath. St. Paul needed to show them the way. The man needed to be excommunicated — “expelled from your midst” — and “deliver[ed] to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.” The world itself was considered under the dominion of the evil and St. Paul was saying that this man, as medicine, needed to be shown that by his actions he was cutting himself off from grace, from Christ’s body, from the Church and choosing Satan over God, destruction over life, Barabbas in the disguise of his stepmother over Christ. This would be the means by which, hopefully, the man would come to his senses like the Prodigal Son, convert and return to the path of salvation.
• This is something Saint Teresa of Calcutta clearly grasped. Urged on by the same charity by which she cared for lepers, those with AIDS and HIV, those covered with maggots drowning in gutters in their own and others’ urine, the untouchables, dying, orphaned, abandoned, unwanted and unborn children and so many others, she likewise denounced the sins that so many others out of cowardice, pride or a lack of genuine concern for the good of the neighbor refused to touch.
• St. Teresa of Calcutta received the strength to go out as a Missionary of Charity to a withered world from Christ himself each day in the Eucharist.  “If we have our Lord in the midst of us, with daily Mass and Holy Communion,” she wrote to her Archbishop soon after founding the Missionaries of Charity, “I fear nothing for the Sisters nor myself; he will look after us. But without him I cannot be. I am helpless” She described her union with Jesus in Holy Communion and adoration as the source of her strength to care for him in the poorest of the poor. Christ’s love in the Eucharist would send her out, just like Mary brought Jesus in haste to her cousin Elizabeth. “Every Holy Communion,” she said in Los Angeles is 1977, “fills us with Jesus and we must, with Our Lady, go in haste to give him to others. For her, it was on her first Holy Communion day that Jesus came into her life, and so for all of us also. He made himself the Bread of Life so that we, too, like Mary, become full of Jesus. We too, like her, be in haste to give him to others. We too, like her, serve others.” And she summarized the secret of holiness, hers and others, by saying: “The time you spend with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament is the best time that you will spend on earth. Each moment that you spend with Jesus will deepen your union with Him and make your soul everlastingly more glorious and beautiful in heaven, and will help bring about an everlasting peace on earth.” Today as we come together on her feast day and 25th anniversary, we ask her intercession that we might pray this Mass with the devotion with which she did, as if it were our first Mass, our last Mass and our only Mass. We ask her to pray that our union with Christ in Holy Communion may spur us on his love in the world. And we beg her to continue to pray for us so that our Christian life may be fruitful like hers and do something beautiful for God so that we, with many others, may come to the place where she now rejoices with Jesus and all the saints forever. Today Jesus says to us as he said to her, “Stretch out your life!,” and we now beg his help to do so with the loving trust, total surrender and joy that marked her life.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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