The Open Secret to Loving God More, 24th Thursday (II), September 20, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Thursday of the 24th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Andrew Kim Taegon and Companions
September 20, 2018
1 Cor 15:1-11, Ps 118, Lk 7:36-50

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 one of most beautiful scenes in the life of Jesus, but it is also one of the most important for us to grasp if we wish to love Jesus and to spread love of him. Jesus is welcomed into the home of a leading Pharisee, Simon, who doesn’t welcome Jesus with the three typical gestures with which guests were always greeted, with an embrace on the shoulder, the washing of feet with cold water, and a pinch of incense or smell of roses on the head. Simon, it seems, not only took typical hospitality for granted but took Jesus for granted.
• The sinful woman in the Gospel, however, did not take him for granted. As Jesus lay reclining with the others at the table, she anointed his feet with oil, then washed them with her tears — think about how copious she must have been weeping! — and then dried them with her long hair. Simon’s reaction was that Jesus couldn’t have been a prophet if he didn’t realize this woman was a sinner, but Jesus in fact recognized they both were and drew an important and obvious lesson we shouldn’t miss as he prepared to forgive her sins and send her away in peace: The one who has been forgiven more, loves more. “But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.” For us to love Jesus much, we need to be forgiven much.
• Pope Francis stresses this point in a book length interview before he became Pope. “For me, feeling oneself a sinner is one of the most beautiful things that can happen, if it leads to its ultimate consequences” the future Pope Francis said in El Jesuita. “When a person becomes conscious that he is a sinner and is saved by Jesus,” Cardinal Bergoglio said, “he proclaims this truth to himself and discovers the pearl of great price, the treasure buried in the field. He discovers the greatest thing in life: that there is someone who loves him profoundly, who gave his life for him.” Many Catholics have sadly not had this fundamental Christian experience. “There are people who believe the right things, who have received catechesis and accepted the Christian faith in some way, but who do not have the experience of having been saved, … who therefore lack the experience of who they are,” he lamented. “I believe that only we great sinners have this grace.”
• That’s why it’s essential for us to have this experience of our desperate need for Christ’s mercy and for us to come, like the woman in the Gospel, to weep at Jesus’ feet, conscious that, as we prayed in the Psalm, “his mercy endures forever” and that he has done everything he did to forgive us our sins. If we remain aloof, like Simon the Pharisee, we’ll never really understand who Jesus is or who we are. Pope Francis said in a homily on this passage a few years ago, Jesus “only says the word salvation – ‘Your faith has saved you’ – to the woman, who is a sinner. And he says it because she was able to weep for her sins, to confess her sins, to say ‘I am a sinner’, and admit it to herself. …  Jesus says this word – ‘You are saved, you are safe – only to those who open their hearts and acknowledge that they are sinners. Salvation only enters our hearts when we open them to the truth of our sins.”
• Someone who was open to this truth was St. Paul. At the end of today’s famous passage in the 15th Chapter of his First Letter to the Corinthians, which may be the earliest part of the New Testament, he wrote, “Last of all, as to one born abnormally [the Greek word means “born aborted, dead], he appeared to me. For I am the least of the Apostles, not fit to be called an Apostle, because I persecuted the Church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me has not been ineffective.” He had been saved by the mercy of the Lord and he spent the rest of his life as an ambassador of mercy pleading with everyone in the Lord’s name to “be reconciled to God” (2 Cor 5:19-20). He made it his life’s mission. That was the kergyma, the essential proclamation of the Good News, he always shared. He told us at the beginning of today’s passage from his first Letter to the Corinthians, that this is a message of mercy that saves. “I am reminding you, brothers and sisters, of the Gospel I preached to you, which you indeed received and in which you also stand. Through it you are also being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you, unless you believed in vain. For I handed on to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures; that he was buried; that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures; that he appeared” to many. He transmitted to others what he considered the most important thing of all, all Christ himself did for the forgiveness of our sins, so that we might know the great love he has for us and rediscover who we are. But that gift itself becomes a task, for us to share that saving word with others, to as St. Paul wrote earlier in this letter, that the love of Christ impels us to share what we ourselves have received and to do as the great priority of our life.
• Today we celebrate the feast of saints who felt God’s mercy very deeply. In the late 1700s, some educated Korean laypeople found some texts from the Jesuit priests who were missionaries in China. Because Korea was so xenophobic, it didn’t allow any foreigners in the country, including missionaries. But these lay people, searching for the truth, found that the Truth had a name. They baptized each other and tried to live the faith as best they could. When finally missionaries were smuggled in later, they found that there were already 4,000 Catholics present. And these Catholics knew how to behave so well that they were willing to suffer for the faith, to pick up their cross daily and even die on it. There were 6 ferocious anti-Christian persecution waves — in 1791, 1801, 1827, 1839, 1846, and 1866 — but none of those pogroms had the purpose that the Korean authorities wanted, of intimidating those who remained out of the practice of the faith. They continued to persevere. Today we celebrate St. Andrew Kim Taegon, who was the first Korean priest. At the age of 15, he was identified by a smuggled French missionary priest as someone with a priestly vocation, and he was sent to walk by foot over 1000 miles to study in a seminary in Macão. While he was away, his father, a convert, was tortured and martyred in the 1839 persecution. Fr. Andrew returned in order to spread  the faith and would die in the persecution of 1846. While he was in prison awaiting execution, he wrote a letter to his fellow Korean Catholics to strengthen them in the faith, to align their lives to Christ’s perennial mercy for them even in suffering. He asked what good would their baptism be “if we are Christians in name alone and not in fact? We would have come into the world for nothing, we would have entered the Church for nothing, and we would have betrayed even God and his grace. It would be better never to have been born than to receive the grace of God and then to sin against him” by betraying the faith under duress. The faith was to influence Christian behavior especially in trial. He called them to model their life on Christ’s own example of suffering. “Dearest brothers and sisters,” he wrote, “when he was in the world, the Lord Jesus bore countless sorrows and by his own passion and death founded his Church; now he gives it increase through the sufferings of his faithful. No matter how fiercely the powers of this world oppress and oppose the Church, they will never bring it down. Ever since his ascension and from the time of the apostles to the present, the Lord Jesus has made his Church grow even in the midst of tribulations. For the last fifty or sixty years, ever since the coming of the Church to our own land of Korea, the faithful have suffered persecution over and over again. Persecution still rages and as a result many who are friends in the household of the faith [a reference to today’s first reading], myself among them, have been thrown into prison and like you are experiencing severe distress.… But, as the Scriptures say, God numbers the very hairs of our head and in his all-embracing providence he has care over us all. Persecution, therefore, can only be regarded as the command of the Lord or as a prize he gives or as a punishment he permits. Hold fast, then, to the will of God and with all your heart fight the good fight under the leadership of Jesus; conquer again the diabolical power of this world that Christ has already vanquished.” This is the example that we asked God at the beginning of Mass today to help us profit from always! The Lord’s mercy, as we say repeatedly in today’s first reading, endures forever.
• In 2015 Pope Francis went to Korea to beatify another 123 of the great martyrs of Korea. There he wanted to help not only Korean Christians today but Catholics everywhere to ponder their example and profit from it in imitation. He illustrated how they showed us all how to behave, how wisdom is vindicated in God’s children, through the power and wisdom of the Cross: “The victory of the martyrs, their witness to the power of God’s love, continues to bear fruit today in Korea, in the Church which received growth from their sacrifice.… Soon after the first seeds of faith were planted in this land, the martyrs and the Christian community had to choose between following Jesus or the world. They had heard the Lord’s warning that the world would hate them because of him (Jn 17:14); they knew the cost of discipleship. For many, this meant persecution, and later flight to the mountains, where they formed Catholic villages. They were willing to make great sacrifices and let themselves be stripped of whatever kept them from Christ – possessions and land, prestige and honor – for they knew that Christ alone was their true treasure.” He went on to apply the example of their witness to our own situation: “So often we today can find our faith challenged by the world, and in countless ways we are asked to compromise our faith, to water down the radical demands of the Gospel and to conform to the spirit of this age. Yet the martyrs call out to us to put Christ first and to see all else in this world in relation to him and his eternal Kingdom. They challenge us to think about what, if anything, we ourselves would be willing to die for.” Will we conform ourselves to Christ in his suffering, death and resurrection, or seek to conform ourselves to this staurophobic (cross-fearing) age? Are we willing to die for him who died for us? Do we know that his mercy endures forever and we will enter into our full share of it only through entering into Christ’s passion, death and resurrection with our own?
• As we come today to celebrate this Mass, we recognize that all of us, like St. Paul, were in a sense born dead, born outside of grace because of original sin, but God has restored us in baptism and so many times in the “second baptism” of the Sacrament of Confession that restores us to our baptismal graces. We recognize that he has saved us through faith. We recognize we’ve been forgiven not just 500 days wages but far more. We ask him for the grace to love him in correspondence to that unbelievable gift, like the martyrs we celebrate today, and to spend today, tomorrow and the rest of our life, passing on to others as of the greatest importance of all what we ourselves have received and what God himself wants to give them.

The readings for today’s Mass were: