Why Can’t We Be Like Ignatius?, 17th Friday (II), July 31, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Friday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Ignatius of Loyola
July 31, 2020
Jer 26:1-9, Ps 69, Mt 13:54-58

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

The following points were attempted in the homily:

• Today in the Gospel we encounter a real-life illustration of many of the lessons Jesus has been teaching us in the Parables of the Kingdom over the last eight days. When Jesus returns to his hometown synagogue to sow the Word of God, he didn’t find in everyone the fruitful soil he found in his Mother and foster-father. He found some rocky soil that immediately responded to his words with astonishment as well as much packed down soil by the wayside that totally resisted his message because their hearts were hardened to the possibility that someone who grew up among them could actually possess such wisdom and work such mighty deeds. They were the ones who would see but not understand, who would hear but not listen. Among the Nazarenes there were wheat and weeds growing up side-by-side, good and bad fish caught in the same net. There were those who were willing to sell all they had to obtain the pearl of great price and the buried treasure who is God and others who didn’t recognize the value of that Pearl and Treasure speaking to them in their own synagogue. There were those with the faith of mustard seeds that would grow large and others whose faith would grow smaller than a mustard seed, for to the one who had more would be given and to the one who had not, even what he had would be taken away. There would be those who, hearing Jesus, would become like the head of the household taking from the storeroom of treasures things both old and new and others who would joylessly draw from that storeroom onlywhat was stale. All of this would be seen when Jesus returned home. At first he was received with astonishment, but that soon passed to offense, and as we know from St. Luke’s account, it would then turn to homicidal thoughts and attempted murder as they sought to toss him off of a Nazarene cliff. “A prophet is not without honor except in his native place and in his own house,” Jesus would say, foretelling the opposition, the suffering, the rejection and sometimes even the martyrdom of God’s ambassadors. St. John’s words in his prologue, “he came to his own, but his own did not receive him,” can be applied not only to the Light who was rejected by those who preferred darkness, but in some way to every prophet. Sometimes those in one’s family, in one’s circle of childhood friends, in one’s neighbors, even in one’s parish or group of fellow believers, prophets will find the greatest resistance
• We see this truth on display in today’s first reading as God sent the Prophet Jeremiah to the Temple to proclaim a message of conversion and an offer of mercy. Jeremiah said that if they would listen and turn back, each from his evil way, God would not allow them to suffer the consequences of their destructive choices, but “if you disobey me, not living according to the law I placed before you and not listening to the words of my servants the prophets, whom I send you constantly though you do not obey them, I will treat this house like Shiloh, and make this the city to which all the nations of the earth shall refer when cursing one another.” Shiloh, as you remember, was where the Ark of the Covenant had been kept for 369 years until the Philistines captured it. Now that ark was in the Temple and God was telling them that just as Shiloh lost the ark and was eventually destroyed, the same thing could happen to the Temple in Jerusalem, and Jerusalem, the Holy City, rather than being a word of spiritual aspiration would become a word worse than Sodom and Gomorrah. Upon hearing those words, “the priests and the prophets” — the leaders of the people, those who were expected holy, to be closest to God — grabbed hold of him and said words that prophesied what would be heard in the Praetorium 639 years later: “You must be put to death!” In order to suppress the message, they would need to extinguish the messenger. In God’s house, where his glory abided, his ambassador and his word were not only unwelcome but marked for extermination.
• We learn from what happened in the lives of Jesus, Jeremiah and so many of the other prophets two key lessons. The first is always to be listening to those God sends, especially if they’re people we know whom we might be tempted to dismiss because we know their history, like those in Nazareth had categorized and conquered Jesus. God will send us plenty of prophets, some of whom will preach in pulpits, some of whom will give us fraternal corrections, others of whom will come to us in manifold ways. We can ever to think we’re “fully formed” and no longer need to heed what God might be saying to us through anyone we meet. The second is that, in living and spreading the faith, we must always be prepared for rejection. Jesus told us about hardened soil, about those who will not receive us, even about others’ hating us like they hated him. He spoke about kings, governors, synagogue officials and even our own kin. He told us that when that happens, however, we should rejoice and be glad, for our reward would be great; to recognize that it would be an occasion for giving testimony; and, if we are free to leave, to leave wiping the dust off of our sandals, not carrying the baggage of emotional wounds to the next place. We need to be prepared for rejection, because ultimately as Jesus says, they’re not rejecting us but him and the One who sent him. On the other hand, he said, those who receive us, receive him and the Father as well, and so we keep going out out giving people a chance to accept the Lord. Rejection is never easy as a human phenomenon but it is a means for greater union with Jesus, for witness of our faith in him out of season, and ultimately for conversion.
• Today we celebrate the feast of someone who shows us how to heed God’s message of conversion given through the prophets and the saints and to persevere through rejection for God’s greater glory. Until he was 30, Iñigo Lopez, the future St. Ignatius of Loyola, vainly sought worldly treasure, mainly honor on the battlefield. But then, in a battle, he had his left leg shattered by a cannonball. While he was convalescing, after exhausting all the romances and knights’ tales he had in his castle, he read a book on the lives of the saints and was pierced by his own shallowness in compared to their substance. He was moved by the saints’ valor and heroism, especially in the face of opposition to the Gospel. He grasped that they were fighting the good fight in the battle that counted most. He thought that they had sought and seized the most valuable treasure. And he asked one of the most important questions in the history of hagiography: “Why can’t I do what Francis of Assisi did? Why can’t I do what Dominic of Guzman did?” He knew that they were men just like him, but men who said yes to God, men who gave God permission to employ them for what he needed most. There would have been hundreds of other saints he could have named from the preceding 1500 years, but I think it’s important to notice that among all the saints whose stories were told in the various books lying around the castle, he chose Francis and Dominic, the two 13th century mendicants who not only extravagantly gave up so much of what the world treasured in order to obtain a much more valuable fortune but who formed bands of brothers who joined themselves around them in order to help the entire world rediscover those hidden riches. Francis and Dominic, and the religious families they founded, were those who suffered a great deal from among the family and friends, from among many of those in the Church at the time, for their radical style of life that to the lukewarm and worldly seemed so fanatical. Led on by their example and many graces, Ignatius made the commitment to serve the true King and sacrifice everything to seize his kingdom. His transformation was arduous. The price was steep. He spent nine months in a cave in Manresa praying, turning his wish into a firm will, allowing God to do the difficult work of melting his worldly ways into clay that could be reformed. The interior struggles he went through as he pondered his sinfulness and Christ’s beauty eventually became his famous Spiritual Exercises, the most popular and influential retreat manual in history. He then knew he would need an education to be of much use, so, in his 30s, he returned to grammar school with young children in order to learn Latin before going for advanced degrees in universities. It was at the famous University of Paris that he met the other first Jesuits, including his roommates, the future St. Francis Xavier and St. Peter Favre, and he helped them to become truly good soil, leaven and seed the Lord could so in the world — and they became the heralds of the King and helped to call the whole Church back to God’s original building plans after the scandals that led to the Protestant Reformation. Their lives in cooperation to God’s grace was done all for God’s greater glory and they continue that maximal glorification with God’s heavenly throne. St. Ignatius’ famous Suscipe shows us the spirituality of a prophet, something that has formed so many waves of Jesuits, like the North American Martyrs, over the course of centuries. “Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding and my entire will, all I have and call my own. You have given all to me. To you, Lord, I return it. Everything is yours; do with it what you will. Give me only your love and your grace. That is enough for me.” He knew that the Lord’s love and grace are sufficient and are a greater treasure than all of the world’s accolades. Similarly his beautiful Prayer for Generosity trains us not to look at what he was freely surrendering to the Lord but to what he was gaining through giving of himself totally, “Lord, teach me to be generous. Teach me to serve you as you deserve; to give and not to count the cost, to fight and not to heed the wounds, to toil and not to seek for rest, to labor and not to ask for reward, save that of knowing that I do your will.”
• One of the climaxes of the Spiritual Exercises is St. Ignatius’ meditation on the two standards or banners. He has us imagine we’re on a big battlefield and on one side there is the standard of Christ and on the other the standard of Satan. We have to choose one or the other. Christ is offering us a life of poverty, humility, self-denial, the Cross. Satan is offering us all the vanity and pleasures of the world. We’re offered two ways of life, two treasures, essentially two gods. We have to choose. The Spiritual Exercises helps us to choose Christ and to persevere in that choice. To choose Christ is to choose to heed his word and to be willing to endure rejection on account of his name. Today it’s important for us to ask, “Why can’t I do what Ignatius has done?” Why can’t I open myself up to God’s grace and seek not just his glory but his greater glory, something that happens when we, like him, are lifted up on the Cross? That’s what God the Father seeks to accomplish by nourishing us with, and uniting us in, his Son, who comes to us in his own native place seeking that we welcome him, not like most of the Nazarenes, but as Mary and Joseph did.
• Today at Mass, we are given the opportunity to receive Jesus into our sanctuary like Mary and Joseph and not like Jesus’ cousins or contemporaries. Rather than calling for his death, we welcome with love the Author of Life. We become here, in essence, an Ark of the Covenant containing within the most precious treasure of all. And so we pray here with words that Saint Iñigo Lopez used to pray in his Thanksgiving each day, asking God with humble prayer, why can’t we do what Ignatius has done: “Soul of Christ, sanctify me. Body of Christ, save me. Water from the side of Christ, wash me. Passion of Christ, strengthen me. Good Jesus, hear me. Within the wounds, shelter me. From turning away, keep me. From the evil one, protect me. At the hour of my death, call me. Into your presence lead me to praise you with all your saints forever and ever. Amen.”

The readings for today’s Mass were:

Gospel
MT 13:54-58

Jesus came to his native place and taught the people in their synagogue.
They were astonished and said,
“Where did this man get such wisdom and mighty deeds?
Is he not the carpenter’s son?
Is not his mother named Mary
and his brothers James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas?
Are not his sisters all with us?
Where did this man get all this?”
And they took offense at him.
But Jesus said to them,
“A prophet is not without honor except in his native place
and in his own house.”
And he did not work many mighty deeds there
because of their lack of faith.