The Obedient Ears of Christ and His Mystical Body Prepared for Him, 3rd Tuesday (I), January 29, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Tuesday of the Third Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Votive Mass for the Family
January 29, 2019
Heb 10:1-10, Ps 40, Mk 3:31-35

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• God the Son came into the world for a two-fold mission and we see both aspects of that mission in today’s readings. His mission was one of obedience. The Letter to the Hebrews tells us that all Old Covenant sacrifices were not sufficient to “take away sins” or to “make perfect those who come to worship by the same sacrifices.” The sacrifices of “bulls and goats” and other animals are a sign of the need for forgiveness, “only a yearly remembrance of sins,” but they are not capable of taking them away and sanctifying the worshippers. That’s in total contrast to the sacrifice Jesus himself would make in the New and Eternal Covenant. Putting into Jesus’ mouth the words of Psalm 40 that constitute today’s Responsorial Psalm, the Letter to the Hebrews says, “For this reason, when he came into the world, he said: ‘Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me; in burnt offerings and sin offerings you took no delight. Then I said, As is written of me in the scroll, Behold, I come to do your will, O God.’” There’s a Hebrew couplet here, in which the same thing is said twice with different words: the first point is that the sacrifices, burnt offerings, sin offerings of the Old Covenant neither were sought by God nor delighted him; the second is that God the Father prepared a body for Jesus, a body that would do God’s will.” That’s the sacrifice that God both desired and that delighted him. God wanted a sacrifice of obedience in the flesh to counteract the sins that needed to be expiated, because every sin, from Adam’s and Eve’s down to yours and mine, flows from disobedience, from a refusal to hear what God is saying and act on it. Pope Benedict wrote about this in his 2008 apostolic exhortation on the Word of God in the life and mission of the Church, Verbum Domini in a paragraph subtitled “Sin as a refusal to hear the word of God”: “The word of God also inevitably reveals the tragic possibility that human freedom can withdraw from this covenant dialogue with God for which we were created. The divine word also discloses the sin that lurks in the human heart. Quite frequently in both the Old and in the New Testament, we find sin described as a refusal to hear the word, as a breaking of the covenant and thus as being closed to God who calls us to communion with himself. Sacred Scripture shows how man’s sin is essentially disobedience and refusal to hear. The radical obedience of Jesus even to his death on the cross (cf. Phil 2:8) completely unmasks this sin. His obedience brings about the New Covenant between God and man, and grants us the possibility of reconciliation. Jesus was sent by the Father as a sacrifice of atonement for our sins and for those of the whole world (cf. 1 Jn 2:2; 4:10; Heb7:27). We are thus offered the merciful possibility of redemption and the start of a new life in Christ. For this reason it is important that the faithful be taught to acknowledge that the root of sin lies in the refusal to hear the word of the Lord, and to accept in Jesus, the Word of God, the forgiveness which opens us to salvation.”
• Jesus’ whole existence is a commentary on obedience. We see a glimpse of this in the Psalm today. If we pay close attention we realize that the way the Psalm is quoted in the Letter to the Hebrews is not exactly the way it appears in the Psalm. The reason for that is because the author of the Letter to the Hebrews was using the Greek Septuagint version of the Old Testament, written about 270 years before Christ by Greek-speaking Jews in Alexandria, Egypt, and the Hebrew version found in the Psalms. The Psalm says, “Sacrifice or oblation you wished not, but ears open to obedience you gave me. Burnt offerings or sin-offerings you sought not; then said I, ‘Behold I come.’” Instead of a “body you have prepared for me,” the Hebrew says, “ears open to obedience you gave me.” As I’ve stressed many times, in Hebrew the same word is used for “listen” and for “obey,” because conceptually the Jews believed if we’re really listening to God we’re going to obey him. In Latin, this same idea is kept in the word for obedience, ob-audire, which means to listen intensively. Jesus came into the world to obey. The entire body God prepared for him was meant to be an “ear” listening to God and acting on what was heard. This was the sacrifice God desired and delighted in. This is the sacrifice that can do far more than symbolize our need for forgiveness but actually expiate our sins of disobedience. Jesus’ whole life was a commentary on the words of the Psalm refrain we recited today, “Here am I, Lord, I come to do your will.”
• But that’s only the first half of the mission for which Jesus took on a body in order to give that body for us in atonement for our sins. He also came into the world to teach us how to obey in the same way, to listen not just with our ears but our whole body and soul and act on what God has asked. Jesus came into the world to form us to be his Mystical Body, and that Body is supposed to be, like Jesus’ “body,” a set of lovingly obedient ears to the Word of will of God.
• We see that in today’s Gospel. When people informed him that his mother and his relatives were outside wanting to see him but couldn’t get into the crowded house, Jesus used it as a teaching opportunity to describe the type of family he had come from heaven to earth to found: “Who are my mother and my brothers?,” he asked. Then turning to those seated around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” The family of faith Jesus was forming for his heavenly Father would be compromised of those who do the Father’s will, those who hear God’s word and act on it. This is obviously what constitutes the greatness of Mary, Jesus’ mother, someone who upon hearing from the Archangel Gabriel that God’s will was for her to conceive the Son of God in her womb, replied, “Let it be done to me according to your will.” Jesus wants us all to become his brothers and sisters morally by imitating him in obeying the Father. He taught us to pray to God as a family asking for the grace to become his true sons and daughters through obedience, by meaning the words Jesus put on our lips: “Our Father… thy will be done.” St. Paul’s words to the Romans here that are a fitting commentary on how God has likewise prepared a body for us so that we may do the Father’s will by obediently offering that body as a sacrifice in union with Jesus for our salvation and the salvation of others. St. Paul wrote, “I urge you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship” (Rom 12:1). To form us to do that is the second reason why Jesus came. And he assists us to do that by uniting us to his body through Holy Communion so that all of us together make one pleasing and acceptable sacrifice to God.
• When the Church is not obedient to God it is an extraordinary scandal that obscures both Christ’s redeeming action and the nature of the Church’s cooperation with that plan. We see that whenever anyone in the Church — priests, bishops, religious, laity — are not faithful to the clear teaching of Christ and his Church. We see it whenever we are unfaithful to the liturgical norms that govern Mass and the sacraments. We see it whenever we are disobedient to the shepherding ministry of the Church. We are dealing now with the tremendous problem, which came to a head a week ago, of a Catholic governor and so many Catholic legislators disobeying God on the fifth commandment not to murder, and rejoicing in their flaunting it, even lighting the freedom tower in pink celebration. Many are calling for their excommunication, but their actions last week were only the wild grapes of many years of dissent and disobedience to the absolutely clear teaching of the Church on the dignity of every human life. We are dealing with so many problems with regard to priestly and episcopal obedience, which have come to the surface, for example, as part of the clergy sexual abuse crisis: so many were doing opposite of what they had committed to do. We see it likewise with religious. In India, headlines are dominated by religious women disobeying clear commands of their superiors and the letters of both are being published in newspapers. The obedience of those in the Church is meant to help the whole Church and world learn how to be obedient to God, and our disobedience is received as a general license.
• We celebrate today a votive Mass for the family based on today’s Gospel. The Opening Prayer of the Mass brings us to the virtues of the Holy Family and the Holy Family was distinguished by its obedience. Mary was obedient to God through the Angel. Joseph was obedient to God through his dreams. Jesus was obedient to Mary and Joseph, his creatures, and grew in wisdom and understanding. Today we ask the Holy Family’s intercession that the virtue of obedience, which is so counter-cultural today in a society with a notion of freedom as doing whatever we want other than the capacity to do what we ought, might grow within each of us, in our families, communities and the whole Church.
• Jesus came in order to obey the Father and make it possible for us to enter into his fiat voluntas tua to the Father. Let us ask him for that grace as we obediently “do this in memory of” him and unite ourselves to his holy holocaust of “ears open to obedience” lived in a body totally given to obedience. Today we say with him, “Here am I, Lord, I come to do your will.”

The readings for today’s Mass were: