The Powerful Mercy With Which the Lord Comes, and Mary’s Cooperation, Second Tuesday of Advent, December 10, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Tuesday of the Second Week of Advent
Memorial of Our Lady of Loreto
December 10, 2019
Is 40:1-11, Ps 96, Mt 18:12-14

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• When Handel wrote his famous Messiah in 1741 to summarize salvation history and tell the story of Jesus the Messiah, the first words in the entire oratorio, what we might call the theme of the whole work, he took from today’s passage: God is, at it were, addressing the entire heavenly court of angels saying, “Comfort, give comfort to my people,” now in exile in Babylon. Everything Jesus would do could be summarized by the comfort he was bringing. What comfort is that? It’s mercy: that Israel’s guilt has been expiated, her service of prayer and reparation is all over. Even though there would be a first fulfillment of this in the return of the exiled Jews to Jerusalem, the prophecy was pointing even more deeply to the return from the exile from the Garden of Eden, the exile from sin. When we pray in the Psalm verse, “The Lord our God comes with power,” we need to remember that his power is mercy. He “com-forts” us, literally makes us “strong with” the power of his merciful love. But we need to cooperate with that merciful strengthening.
• The passage from the Prophet Isaiah continues today with words made even more famous by St. John the Baptist, as we heard on Sunday: “In the desert prepare the way of the Lord! Make straight in the wasteland a highway for our God! Every valley shall be filled in, every mountain and hill shall be made low; The rugged land shall be made a plain, the rough country, a broad valley.” We need to do the work to prepare for the Lord’s mercy through examining our sins, confessing them, repenting of them, repairing the damage. The Lord’s way, as we would have heard yesterday if we didn’t have the Immaculate Conception proper readings, is a way of holiness that, as we heard Saturday, is the one the Lord himself indicates and on which the redeemed shall walk. But this path of mercy and repentance is what the Messiah wants from us to fulfill his work. Then what Isaiah says we will behold: “Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together. This will lead to people seeing the glory of the Lord.”
• Part of making straight that path for the Lord to come to comfort us is to recognize the vanity of earthly things in comparison to the perennial stability of the word of God. That’s what God tells Isaiah to announce first when he asks, “What shall I cry out?” The Lord responds, “All flesh is grass, and all their glory like the flower of the field. …Though the grass withers and the flower wilts, the word of our God stands forever.” This is an important message for us to grasp in order to live Advent well. Today a real danger in the living of Advent is that we get children’s hearts focused so much on things that “wither,” whether material things or ephemeral celebrations rather than for the Word of God who comes to dwell among us. Isaiah was to help the people recognize the contrast between God’s word and everything else not associated with God and we need to be Isaiah’s for our modern commercialized age, praising the generosity of those who sacrifice to give to others, but at the same time, not sacrificing for vain things, helping to distort others’ value structures.
• As soon as Isaiah has helped people to appreciate the true value of the Word of God, then God instructs him to go up to Mount Zion as a herald of good news and and cry out at the top of his voice, “Here is your God! Here comes with power the Lord God.” This is the essential Advent message: God is coming! He’s coming with his power but he is also coming with tenderness: he will feed his flock like a shepherd, gather the lambs in his arms, carry them, and lead the ewes with care. At the fulfillment of the long Advent of the Jews, that’s exactly what God himself did. Jesus would use these images to describe his own vocation as the Good Shepherd. He would do far more than just feed, embrace, carry and lead. He would also die out of love for his sheep, in order precisely to envelope us in his mercy.
• We see a glimpse of the Good Shepherd’s comfort and consolation in the Gospel. Jesus is a shepherd who leaves the 99 and goes after the one and ignites a celebration when he finds the sheep and brings him home. This shows how personally the Good Shepherd cares for each of us. In St. Luke’s Gospel, he would link this specifically to his mission of mercy (Lk 15), saying heaven rejoices more for the return of one lost sheep than for 99 who didn’t need to repent. John Paul II once said about the Sacrament of Penance that that’s where the love of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, where all God’s power, exist just for us as an individual. Whereas at a Mass God can feed all of us at the same time with his Word and his Body and Blood, in the Sacrament of his Mercy, everything outside in a sense stops as God cares for every sheep, lamb or ewe personally. That’s where mountains are leveled and shallow valleys filled in. That’s where rough ways are made smooth and crooked ways made straight. That’s where we recognize and admit that we’ve set our hearts too often on vain things instead of treasuring God’s word. That’s God’s great “lost and found” department. That’s where we see the glory of the Lord, where we see God’s mercy and where we are helped to become the glory of God by becoming fully alive (St. Ireneus: gloria Dei vivens homo). So this Advent it is key for all of us to receive the comfort and tender love of the Good Shepherd one-on-one in the Sacrament of Penance, and allow Jesus to start the celebration.
• Today we celebrate in a particular way how Mary shares in Jesus’ mission of comforting his people with his mercy. On October 31, Pope Francis, though the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, decreed that the memorial of Our Lady of Loreto, celebrated each year on December 10, be extended to the entire Church. December 10 was the day in 1294 when, according to tradition, the holy house where Mary was born, where the Archangel Gabriel visited her, and where the Word became flesh, arrived in the Italian hillside town of Loreto, where, eventually, a great basilica was built above it to house it. It’s Italy’s most important, and most visited, Marian shrine. It’s a place in which we can ponder the Immaculate Conception, the Incarnation and Mary’s response to God to let her whole life happen according to God’s word. This feast, therefore, is an occasion for us to pray about God’s desire for us to be holy and immaculate in his sight, Jesus’ becoming one of us to make that happen, and our cooperation with his merciful action. By her fiat, Mary fully shares in that mission. In the Litany of Blessed Virgin Mary, commonly known as the Litany of Loreto because of its association with that Basilica, where it was first used in 1558 and eventually was set to music in such a way that Pope Sixtus V in 1587 decreed that all other Marian litanies should be suppressed in its favor, we turn to Mary and invoke her as “Virgin most merciful,” “Refuge of Sinners,” “Mother most pure, “Mother inviolate,” and “Queen conceived without original sin,” and ask her to “pray for us,” to pray that we might receive the fullness of her Son’s saving mercy.
• Today on her feast, we thank the Lord for the gift of her intercession and example. It’s part of the way the Lord speaks tenderly not just to Jerusalem and Nazareth but to New York. And we ask him who like a Shepherd feeds his flock to feed us with himself as we, in imitation of Mary, gather him into our arms and mouths and carry Him within our bosom!

The readings for today’s Mass were:

Reading 1
IS 40:1-11

Gospel
MT 18:12-14

Jesus said to his disciples:
“What is your opinion?
If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them goes astray,
will he not leave the ninety-nine in the hills
and go in search of the stray?
And if he finds it, amen, I say to you, he rejoices more over it
than over the ninety-nine that did not stray.
In just the same way, it is not the will of your heavenly Father
that one of these little ones be lost.”