Fr. Roger J. Landry
Chapel of the Pontifical Mission Societies, Manhattan
Monday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of SS. Fabian and Sebastian, Martyrs
January 20, 2025
Heb 5:1-10, Ps 110, Mk 2:18-22
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
The following points were attempted in today’s homily:
- At the beginning of Ordinary Time, the Church wants to help us to relate to what God is seeking to do with renewed, fresh receptivity. The Church has us focus four times a year at daily Mass on Jesus’ words about feasting and fasting and the parables of the patch and of the wineskins (the 2nd Monday of Ordinary Time, the Friday after Ash Wednesday, the 13th Saturday, and the 22nd Friday). It is one of the most common themes we have, because it’s central to our life as believers. But today we can focus on the fresh receptivity we’re called to give. Jesus, with regard to fasting, said that his disciples needed to learn how to fast differently than the disciples of John the Baptist and the Pharisees, who fasted in reparation, petition and for self-discipline. Jesus wanted his disciples to fast for union with God, to hunger for what God hungers, and to feast when they are in union like “sons of the wedding chamber” do when the Bridegroom is with them and the wedding reception is on-going. Jesus uses two homespun images to illustrate the point. He says he’s not trying to place a small patch on the Old Covenant garments, to improve it in a slight way; rather he’s giving a totally new garment, namely our baptismal garment. Similarly the “new wine” he is pouring out cannot be received by tough, un-expansive old wineskins but they need to be received with fresh wineskins that can expand as the new wine expands. He’s constantly giving us those new wineskins to receive his ever recreative love.
- Ultimately, Jesus says we will fast when the “Bridegroom is taken away from them.” The verb “taken away” in Greek actually means “ripped away.” It’s the same verb that’s used when Jesus was taken out of the Garden of Gethsemane at his arrest by the soldiers of the high priest. This is an indication that we’re called too fast to be united with his passion. That’s what leads us to today’s very important passage from the Letter to the Hebrews. Throughout the Letter until now, we have learned that God the Father’s definitive Word, his Son, has come to lead us to perfection, to eternal salvation, through his suffering and through helping us suffer with him. The Letter has urged us not to harden our hearts to this message but to let the Word profit us by approaching God’s throne to receive mercy and grace whenever we need it. Today the Letter continues to show us the type of high priest we have, the one who is able to sympathize with us in our weaknesses, because he himself has been tested (tempted) in every way we have been and faithfully passed those tests. Like the old covenant high priests, Jesus has been chosen from among men — hence the incarnation, where God the Father said “You are my Son” and made him a priest not according to the order of Levi but the order of Melchizedek — to represent us before God and to offer sacrifices not of bulls and goats and other animals but to offer himself. He is able to deal patiently with others because he has his own human physical weaknesses. Hence he prayed with “loud cries and tears” and “learned obedience from what he suffered” and was perfected by what he suffered. Jesus wants us, through our baptismal and — in my case — ministerial priesthood to receive the gift of his priesthood with freshness and through our fasting seek to unite ourselves totally to that work, recognizing that we too have been chosen in him to offer ourselves as the holy and acceptable sacrifice, our spiritual worship (Rom 12:1-2), so that we might receive salvation and in Christ be a minister of eternal salvation to others. He wants us to come to spiritual perfection through uniting ourselves to his obedience and his suffering. That’s what our common priesthood through baptism is about. Just like there needed to be a new fasting, there likewise needed to be a new conception of the high priesthood and what Jesus is trying to do in us through making us a kingdom of priests in him. An important part of that priesthood is learning obedience through what we suffer, doing the will of God even when it’s hard — like we learn through fasting from good things of the body — so that he may bring us to perfection, to fulfillment according to how he’s made us.
- The saints we celebrate are models of this path of obedience to the perfection of charity that is sanctity. St. Fabian was a Christian layman who came to Rome to see what would happen after the death of Pope Anteros in 236. The electors were deadlocked. They looked for divine inspiration and saw a white dove flying, which helped them to open themselves up to who the Holy Spirit would want. The dove descended, passed over the heads of various of the leading candidates and then settled on this spectator, Fabian. They took it as a sign that this good man, from a noble family, was the one God wanted, and they chose him, ordained him a deacon, priest and bishop and he served through 250. At the beginning of his pontificate, he had decent relations with the Roman authorities and was even able to arrange with them for the return of the relics of Saints Pontus and Hippolytus. It was peaceful enough to build an organization to care for the poor and he was the one who arranged the sections of the city into diakonia, to care for the poor in an organized way, adapting to what the Lord wanted even though obviously there had been no such structures before him. In the year 250, however, the emperor Decius turned on the Christians and Fabian was the first one martyred. The lesson he teaches us is how to obey the Lord always in changing circumstances, a lesson he taught to help guide the Christians of his time along that same path of spiritual perfection through obedience even to death on the Cross with Christ, even to martyrdom.
- We see a similar lesson of perfection in the life of St. Sebastian. He was a guard very much in the favor of the emperor Diocletian who was able to remain faithful to the Lord while serving in the Roman army. He used his office as the head of the guards in order to support Christians who were being rounded up as martyrs and to console and, on some occasions, convert their pagan parents, friends and family members who had come to try to talk them out of “wasting” their lives in martyrdom. But when word eventually got to Diocletian about what Sebastian was doing for the Christians — and that he himself was a Christian too — Diocletian responded by rage as if Sebastian had betrayed him. And, as the early Christians said, he was martyred twice. The first time he was shot seemingly to death with arrows and they brought him for burial, but there they recognized he wasn’t dead and nursed him back to health. Having recovered, he went back to try to talk sense into Diocletian surprising him on a staircase and preaching to him almost as a man returned from the dead. Diocletian would have none of it and had him beaten to death by clubs. In every circumstance, Sebastian sought to obey what the Lord was asking of him, he sought to receive the new wine of each day, as he purified his baptismal garment in the blood of Christ to which he joined his own blood.
- Today as we come to this Mass to meet Christ our High Priest, we have fasted not only from food but from our old ways, so that as he makes supplications and prayers to the Father for us and gets ready to offer himself up as the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him and “do this in memory of him,” we may fully receive this gift and as not just “sons of the wedding chamber” but as the Bride rejoice in such a way that others may even be positively scandalized! We ask him for the grace to unite all of our own sufferings to his self-offering on the Cross, so that he can perfect us as a kingdom of priests and so that we can make up for what is lacking in us of his sufferings for the sake of his beloved Bride and Body the Church!
The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 HEB5:1-10
Brothers and sisters:
Every high priest is taken from among men
and made their representative before God,
to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins.
He is able to deal patiently with the ignorant and erring,
for he himself is beset by weakness
and so, for this reason, must make sin offerings for himself
as well as for the people.
No one takes this honor upon himself
but only when called by God,
just as Aaron was.
In the same way,
it was not Christ who glorified himself in becoming high priest,
but rather the one who said to him:
You are my Son:
this day I have begotten you;
just as he says in another place,
You are a priest forever
according to the order of Melchizedek.
In the days when he was in the Flesh,
he offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears
to the one who was able to save him from death,
and he was heard because of his reverence.
Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered;
and when he was made perfect,
he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.
Responsorial Psalm PS 110:1, 2, 3, 4
R. (4b) You are a priest for ever, in the line of Melchizedek.
The LORD said to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand
till I make your enemies your footstool.”
R. You are a priest for ever, in the line of Melchizedek.
The scepter of your power the LORD will stretch forth from Zion:
“Rule in the midst of your enemies.”
R. You are a priest for ever, in the line of Melchizedek.
“Yours is princely power in the day of your birth, in holy splendor;
before the daystar, like the dew, I have begotten you.”
R. You are a priest for ever, in the line of Melchizedek.
The LORD has sworn, and he will not repent:
“You are a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek.”
R. You are a priest for ever, in the line of Melchizedek.
Alleluia HEB 4:12
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
The word of God is living and effective,
able to discern reflections and thoughts of the heart.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel MK 2:18-22
The disciples of John and of the Pharisees were accustomed to fast.
People came to Jesus and objected,
“Why do the disciples of John and the disciples of the Pharisees fast,
but your disciples do not fast?”
Jesus answered them,
“Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them?
As long as they have the bridegroom with them they cannot fast.
But the days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them,
and then they will fast on that day.
No one sews a piece of unshrunken cloth on an old cloak.
If he does, its fullness pulls away,
the new from the old, and the tear gets worse.
Likewise, no one pours new wine into old wineskins.
Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins,
and both the wine and the skins are ruined.
Rather, new wine is poured into fresh wineskins.”
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