The Most Powerful Aid to Sanctification, Third Wednesday of Easter, May 8, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the Third Week of Easter
Memorial of Blessed Miriam Teresa Demjanovich
May 8, 2019
Acts 8:1-8, Ps 66, Jn 6:35-40

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

The following points were pondered in the homily:

• Today Jesus continues for us his Bread of Life Discourse in Day Five of the mystagogical Eucharistic catechesis that the Church gives us every Easter season so that we can ponder how we’re supposed to encounter the Risen Jesus and experience within us the power of his resurrection and risen life. While he was saying these words in the Capernaum Synagogue, no one really knew what he really meant, about how he was to be the Bread of Life, how we were to eat his flesh and drink his blood and have life because of him. As we’ll see on Saturday, not even the apostles could understand how that was possible. It would only begin to make sense one year later when Jesus would take bread and wine into his hands during the Last Supper and totally change them into his Body and Blood, give himself to the apostles to eat and ordain them with the power to go out and do this in memory of him, so that we, too, could live off of Jesus. At the time, however, people were wrestling with the unpleasant cannibalistic overtones not to mention the aspects of Jewish law, particularly concerning touching not to mention drinking blood, that would make them ritually impure. So Jesus needed to focus on faith. He had said before that the work of God is to believe in the One God sent, and obviously to believe in Jesus is to believe in what he said. At the very end of the discourse, when Jesus asked the apostles whether they wanted to abandon him over the hard teaching of the Eucharist, Peter said, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” He was confessing he had no idea how he would eat Jesus’ Body and drink his blood, but because he believed in Jesus, he would believe in what he was teaching, even though it exceeded his capacity for imagination at the time. Today Jesus centers in on the process of faith needed to accept his words on the Eucharist and enter into risen life with him through his Body and Blood.
• Jesus’ words about faith in the Eucharist are really important for us today because, frankly, many Catholics have totally ceased to be scandalized by the Eucharist. Instead of thinking they’re consuming Jesus’ body and blood, they just believe they’re consuming special generically-consecrated “bread” and “wine.” They think they’re doing something holy, but they’re not really conscious that they are preparing to do by far the most unbelievable action a human being could ever do, which is to enter into Communion with the One through whom all things were made. Just like Jesus said to those in the Capernaum Synagogue, so he could say to many Catholics, “Although you have seen me, you do not believe.” So let us ask Jesus to increase our faith as we ponder anew the words he says to us today!
• Jesus describes in today’s Gospel various stages of the process of growth in faith in him in the Holy Eucharist:
  • The first stage is grace. “Everything that the Father gives me will come to me.” Elsewhere he’ll say that no one can come to him unless the Father draw him. Faith is an unmerited gift of the loving Father. The Father first attracts.
  • The second step is coming to Jesus. We come into his presence. “I will not reject anyone who comes to me,” Jesus says. We have to go to him.
  • The third step is seeing Jesus. We see him with our eyes, hear him with our ears, we come into contact with him through our senses. We need to keep our eyes fixed on him.
  • The fourth step requires both grace and freedom: we believe in him, we find him trustworthy and begin to trust in him and in what he says. Jesus says, “Everyone who sees the Son and believes in him…” As I just mentioned, Peter will express this faith on Saturday, because as St. Thomas wrote in his famous Adoro Te Devote, “Seeing, touching, tasting are in you deceived. Only faithful fearing, that can be believed. I believe whatever the Son of God has said, because nothing can be truer than the word of truth.” We need faith to look beyond the appearances of bread and wine to recognize the presence of God, just like Jesus’ contemporaries needed to look beyond his humanity to perceive his divinity.
  • Fifth, through faith we begin to experience his life, and because his life is eternal, our existence changes. Before we’re experiencing biological life, but not yet the supernatural life that God wants to give us. But everyone who sees the Son and believes in him has “eternal life” and Jesus promises to raise us on the last day. And that life begins not later when we die, but right now through communion with Jesus by means of the extravagant gift of the Holy Eucharist. “I am the bread of life,” Jesus begins this whole section by saying: “Whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.” Jesus totally changes our desires, our aspirations, our hungers, our thirsts. He begins to give us a downpayment on their total fulfillment when he raises us on the last day, because through the progression of faith all the way toward the faithful communion with him, he’s raising us up on this day.
• That transformation of human existence into the Christian life has consequences. We see two illustrations of it. The first is the American raised to the altars whom the Church celebrates today: Blessed Miriam Teresa Demjanovich, the first American to be beatified on our shores, on October 4, 2014 in Newark’s Sacred Heart Basilica, where several of you and I were happily present. I’ve spoken on past celebrations of her feast about the beauty of her vocation story, but what I would like to focus on today are her thoughts on living a truly Eucharistic life. She wrote about it in the 26 conferences on religious life that her spiritual director Benedictine Father Benedict Bradley, with the permission of her superior, asked her to write so that he might preach them to her and her fellow novices as if he had composed them. Father Bradley acknowledged that he had received a grace to ask Sister Miriam Teresa to do something that was basically unheard of for someone so young in the religious life. “I believed that she enjoyed extraordinary lights, and I knew that she was living an exemplary life,” he stated. “I thought that, one day, she would be ranked among the saints of God, and I felt it was incumbent upon me to utilize whatever might contribute to an appreciation of her merits after her death.” It was only after her death that he put a note on the motherhouse’s bulletin board declaring, “The conferences that I have been giving to the sisters were written by Sister Miriam Teresa.” Her brother, Msgr. Charles, published those conferences a year later under the title of Greater Perfection. She was known both before the convent, in it and after her death, 92 years ago today, for her Eucharistic piety.  “In partaking of the Blessed Sacrament,” she wrote, “we have a most powerful aid to sanctification. God himself comes to perfect us, if we but so will.” She so willed, and so advanced in holiness. She developed the point:  “The imitation of Christ in the lives of the saints,” she wrote, “is always possible and compatible with every state of life. The saints did but one thing — the will of God. But they did it with all their might. We have only to do the same thing — and according to the degree of intensity with which we labor shall our sanctification progress.” She added, “The reason we have not yet become saints is because we have not understood what it means to love. We think we do, but we do not. To love means to annihilate oneself for the beloved. … To love is to conform oneself to the Beloved in the most intimate manner of which we are capable.” The Lord, through the stages Jesus mentions today, gives us the Eucharistic path of conforming ourselves to him in the most intimate manner, so that we might become Whom we eat.
• I’ll mention a few of her thoughts specifically on the Eucharist in the conferences she wrote for herself and her fellow sisters. The first is about seeing Christ with faith. She said, “Had we been on Calvary, the picture of that awful scene would never have left our minds and its lessons would have borne fruit in our lives. [Does] our faith penetrate the mystery of the daily Calvary of the altar, the image of the uplifted Crucified, … raised aloft in the hands of the priest, … show it stamp in our lives? The Lamb is being sacrificed every moment; and we are the followers, brethren, spouses of the Lamb. He sacrificed himself for each one of us individually and for all men together with ineffable love, compassionate forgiveness, exquisite agony of body and mind and spirit. And we, whom He desires to be sacrificed through Him and with Him and in Him, how do we comply with his wishes?” She wants us to recognize that what happens on the altar is the Upper Room, Calvary and Jesus’ risen body leaving the tomb, all in one, and to live this mystery the way we would have been impacted by Jesus’ Passion, Death and Resurrection had we been eyewitnesses and followers.
• The second is about how we come to him and whether we offer ourselves together with Jesus to the Father. She wrote, “God holds out the Gift, His well-beloved Son. … Why is not the union He so ardently, so vehemently desires, achieved? Ah, we do not will to give the Son back to the Father … with intensity of faith, with earnestness of purpose. … We believe, yes, but our faith is half-hearted. … We believe in theory, but shrink from the practice. We return the Gift to the Father, but withhold the giver, ourselves, and still somehow expect that fullness of life shall be ours. … We know that the gift without the giver is bare. Therefore, our share in the sacrifice is almost meaningless [and] our spiritual growth is so small. Christ offers Himself for us but we do not will to offer ourselves with Him. We hold back. There is no oneness of mind, no close union of will. So the Life of our Head does not flow in all its invigorating power through us, the members of His body; the connection is injured. We desire to reap the harvest but dislike putting our hands to the plow. God looks to the love of the giver, the love that is in our hearts. … We must offer it with Christ, and through Christ and in Christ. We must identify our lives with His sentiments, with the intention wherewith He offers Himself to the Father in our Name. … The more we conform ourselves to the image of the Word, the more precious in the sight of God will be our gift.” We must make our life an offertory, together with Jesus.
• The third point is about how the Eucharist is supposed to become life-giving in all aspects of our existence. We must, she writes, “will with determined effort to live out our share of the sacrifice of the Mass in union with our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and to participate in that Sacrifice as frequently as it is offered. … Only in trying so to live, to make the Mass a vital thing in our daily actions, to live our faith in practice, to perform our tasks in the spirit of our living Head and according to the principles He … laid down for us — only in trying so to do shall we be rendering to God the things that are God’s , our being, our life, our soul, with the full capacity of our measure as creatures of God.” This is what we might call the Eucharistic unity of life, that she herself lived and helped her fellow sisters to live.
• The second dramatic illustration of what happens when we draw our life from the Eucharist we see in today’s first reading from the Acts of the Apostles. As we’ve been following throughout the readings of the Acts of the Apostles during this Easter Season, the Sanhedrin had long been threatening to do to the apostles and members of the early Church what they did to Jesus. They had been arresting the apostles, imprisoning them, threatening them, even flogging them. But they had resisted putting any to death until what we saw yesterday, when they ended up stoning St. Stephen for his reiterating what Jesus himself had taught and showing how all of salvation history reached its fulfillment in Jesus. Stephen’s martyrdom, presided over by Saul, unleashed a ferocious persecution. St. Luke tells us today, “There broke out a severe persecution of the Church in Jerusalem, and all were scattered throughout the countryside of Judea and Samaria, except the Apostles.” The Apostles courageously stood firm at first and didn’t move. Everyone else, probably at their behest, was scattered. And St. Luke, who eventually became the converted Saul’s secretary, tells us what Saul was doing: “Saul, meanwhile, was trying to destroy the Church; entering house after house and dragging out men and women, he handed them over for imprisonment.” The Greek word St. Luke employs is basically the “savage ravaging” of a wild animal ripping up one’s prey. Once that began, the Christian diaspora occurred, as the Christians were scattered far and wide. But what happened when they fled? What did they say when they entered new neighborhoods? Did they say, “Woe are we! We’re being persecuted! We’re being hunted down as criminals by savage beasts! Please pity us and help us!?” No. “Those who had been scattered,” St. Luke says, “went about preaching the word.” The persecution was an opportunity for proclamation. Instead of preaching what would evidently seem to be their misfortune, they were preaching Christ and the power of his Resurrection. Their hunger and thirst were for God and his kingdom, not for their houses and their lives to remain undisturbed. They rejoiced in the blessings of their faith rather than lamented the sufferings on account of the faith. They saw in the diaspora, the scattering, an opportunity to take the message of Jesus to others, and they seized that opportunity. Likewise, our sufferings are often an opportunity for us to give witness to our faith to others whom we would never have met otherwise: perhaps it’s the medical staff in the hospital, or the people who witness how we handle an unjust attack, or even our fellow prisoners.
• We see what happened with the Deacon Philip. His needing to flee led to his bringing three things to the city of Samaria. First, he “proclaimed the Christ to them.” St. Luke tells us that “with one accord, the crowds paid attention to what was said.” Second, he brought healing and liberation through the power of Jesus working through his faith: “unclean spirits, crying out in a loud voice, came out of many possessed people, and many paralyzed and crippled people were cured.” And third, as a result of bringing Jesus, his words, and his healing power, he brought Easter joy: ” There was great joy in that city,” St. Luke says. It’s a model for us. After the progression of faith that leads to a holy Communion with Jesus, a communion of hunger and thirst with him when we begin to desire what he desires and will what God wills, we bring word and witness of that risen life of Jesus to others. When we do so credibly, individuals and even crowds will pay attention. Then we’re called to bring healing and liberation. God can in fact use us to bring about spectacular physical and spiritual miracles, but normally he will use us to bring about ordinary, and even more important, miracles, helping people to find hope in the midst of pain, forgiveness in wounded relationships, purpose and direction for someone lost, in short the riches of a kingdom in the midst of lives that are spiritually impoverished. And when we bring that faith, that hope, that love — when we bring the presence and love of God — joy results. This is the way that “all the earth” will “cry out to God with joy.”
• The question for us is whether we’re going to wait for someone to savagely ravage our life, ransack our house, seek to arrest us and put us to death to wait until we bring Jesus, his healing and his joy to others. We shouldn’t have to wait. If we really grasp our faith, if we’ve really been drawn by the Father, come to Jesus, seen him, believed in him, experienced the power of his risen life triumphing over death, begun to hunger and thirst for what he wills and desires, and entered into a communion of love with him through receiving his holy body and blood as we are about to do, then spreading the joy we experience should become the most natural and supernatural thing we do. Today the Lord is calling each of us to be like the first Christians and at the end of this Mass to be scattered and go about to preach the Word so that some day, some holy Chronicler like St. Luke will be able to write about New York because of our efforts, “There was great joy in that city!” And the gift we receive to help us to do that is the same Gift that Blessed Miriam Teresa reminded us is the “most powerful aid to sanctification of all,” Jesus Christ, the Bread of Life, who has come to nourish us again today.

The readings for today’s Mass were: