The Obedience of Faith Flowing from the Encounter with Christ, 28th Monday (I), October 11, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of Pope St. John XXIII
October 11, 2021
Rom 1:1-7, Ps 98, Lk 11:29-32

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• One of the real dangers in the spiritual life, especially those who are always around the sacred, is to begin to take the sacred for granted because of routine or over-exposure. Today’s Gospel is one of the best to help snap us out of it. Jesus reminds us that he’s a greater sign of conversion than Jonah and a greater source of wisdom than Solomon. That leads us to ask ourselves that if the pagan Ninevites totally converted at Jonah’s preaching and the Queen of Sheba were willing to travel 1,660 miles each way just to hear Solomon’s wisdom, are we converting each time we come into God’s presence as profoundly as the Ninevites did, and are we hanging on Christ’s words of wisdom the way the Queen of Sheba did?
• St. Paul is someone who was converted entirely when he encountered Christ, spent 14 years in the desert of Arabia seeking to learn Christ’s wisdom in prayer and then spent the rest of his life trying to bring people to conversion and to enrich the Church with Christ’s wisdom. In today’s first reading we begin four weeks studying his greatest theological treatise, written not so much in response to questions or problems in a community he had founded (like in so many other letters) but to a community he had never visited, proposing what were in his mind answers to the biggest questions they probably would have, about how to be right with God, about how to trust in God’s love and cooperate with the Holy Spirit, about the status of the Jews, and about authentic Christian spirituality. Today he describes himself to the Romans and what he was hoping to do. He says that he is a “slave of Christ Jesus,” serving him as Lord, was “called to be an apostle,” and was consecrated or “set apart for the Gospel.” He wanted to serve Christ better than any slave his Master, knowing that the way he would do so is belonging fully to him and the Apostle that Jesus himself called and sent him out to proclaim. His mission, he tells us, was to bring about the “obedience of faith” in those “called to belong to Jesus Christ” and “called to be holy.” He was seeking to make them by faith slaves of Christ too, belonging to him, obeying him with love, becoming united to him in a holy communion. The underlying truth he was conveying is that when we truly believe, faith impacts our life. It revolutionizes every thing. When we believe in Christ, we convert from our own ways and seek to live as he lives, structuring our whole life not on earthly wisdom but his wisdom. When we grasp Christ, and treat him as Lord, we, too, become living, loving, “slaves” of Christ Jesus (instead of sin) because that is paradoxically the path to true freedom, since the truth of his wisdom sets us free.
• Someone who understood this truth is the holy one the Church celebrates today, Pope St. John XXIII. His papal motto was oboedientia et pax, obedience and peace, two things that to modern antinomian sensibilities might not seem to go together but that he saw were essentially connected. From the time he was a 14-year-old in a high school seminary, he grasped that in order to bear fruit in his life, he needed to live by a “Rule of life,” a set of spiritual practices that would help him grow in conformity to Christ, and he kept them his entire life. He was an obedient disciple above all, saying fiat to what the Lord asked. After his death, his former secretary said that John’s “Rules of Life” were truly rules for life. “He copied them out by hand, in minute writing, kept them always by him and constantly observed them, even when he was pope,” Cardinal Loris Capovilla said. They were the blueprint for John’s growth in sanctity in correspondence to God’s grace. He wrote in his diary in 1954 about the treasure of the Gospel: “What matters most in this life is: our blessed Jesus Christ, his holy Church, his Gospel, and in the Gospel above all else the Our Father according to the mind and heart of Jesus.” He sought to renew the Church in this obedience that leads to sanctity and to peace. Saint John XXIII died on June 3, 1963, but we celebrate his feast day today, October 11, the day he, responding to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, convened the Second Vatican Council. The Second Vatican Council was an attempt to launch a new Pentecost, to open the windows of the Church for the Holy Spirit to come in with his tongues of fire to propose the Gospel in a compelling way to the people of today so as to bring people together. It was a means by which to try to attune the Church in greater docility and obedience to what God was asking. This was, for him, the path to peace. He sought to unite us to Christ in a Church and world that was growing increasing polarized as a result of two world wars, various genocides and the cold war, as a result of a growing separation between north and south, between rich and poor, developed and developing.
• At every Mass, we meet the One greater than Solomon and Jonah. We hear him speak, constantly calling us to a new way of life, living as he lives. It’s here that he helps us to live up to our calling to be holy, strengthens us for the obedience of faith, and sends us forth, like he did after his encounter with St. Paul, with the “grace of apostleship” to extend the peace of his kingdom to the world.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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