The Purpose of Our Existence, 28th Friday (II), October 16, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Friday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque
October 16, 2020
Eph 1:11-14, Ps 33, Lk 12:1-7

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

The outline for today’s homily was:

• “Blessed the people the Lord has chosen to be his own.” God has indeed, as we heard yesterday from the beginning of St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, chosen us from before the foundation of the world and has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavens. In today’s passage, we see how both Jews — those “who first hoped in Christ” — and Gentiles alike are blessed by God so that we might exist “for the praise of his glory.” We exist, the purpose of our life, both in an objective and subjective sense, is for the praise of God’s glory. Both Jews and Gentiles have heard the word of truth, received the Gospel of salvation, believed in God, and received the seal of the Holy Spirit. These gifts, received and lived as they’re intended, objectively give praise to God, just like the beautiful snow-capped mountain ranges, the pure streams and lakes, the wonderful ocean vistas, and many other natural phenomena all sing praise to our Creator. But this objective glorification of God is meant to be complemented by our subjective cooperation. We are called to want to praise God’s glory. To praise him in our prayer. To praise him in our good deeds, so that others in seeing them, as Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount, may give glory to our Father in heaven. To praise and glorify him by our whole life, as we seek to live by the word of truth that sets us free, as we announce the Gospel of salvation, as we walk by faith, as we are guided by the Spirit. All of these gifts that we invest and with God’s help try to grow, St. Paul concludes the passage today, are just the down payment, the “first installment” of our inheritance. We exist for the praise of God’s glory here looking ahead, we pray by God’s mercy, to the enhanced existence for the praise of God’s glory we call heaven. We have been chosen and destined according to the purpose and intention of God’s will precisely for this, “for redemption as God’s possession,” belonging to God as redeemed men and women, those who give witness at all times to the merciful love of the Redeemer and try to bring others to experience these same blessings, because they, too, were created and redeemed for the praise of God’s glory.
• This identity should strengthen us at all times and influence all our actions. In today’s Gospel, Jesus warns us of the “leaven” or hypocrisy of the Pharisees, the particular corruption about which he’s been speaking for several days. Pharisaical hypocrisy is a cancer that metastasizes and grows. Jesus wants us to be a different type of leaven, in correspondence with the Holy Spirit with which we’ve been sealed. When the Holy Spirit works within, we receive, among other things, his help to live with integrity, to proclaim the faith, to trust in God’s providence and to live with courage. The Holy Spirit reminds and convinces us of the truth of what Jesus teaches, so that we may proclaim it in light from the housetops. The Holy Spirit helps us to cry out “Abba! Dad,” and to grasp that we are worth more than many sparrows and all the lilies of the field. The Holy Spirit helps us to live in the presence of God and all of his angels and saints, conscious that there is nothing done in secret that will not be known. The Holy Spirit forms us to live, for those reasons, with great courage, not fearing those who can only kill the body, but rather living with a holy awe of the One who can cast into Gehenna — God himself — but who chooses us instead to be his own and blesses us with every spiritual blessing. This is the Christian life.
• We see the powerful way the Holy Spirit did this in the life of saint whom the Church celebrates today. St. Margaret Mary Alacoque shows how God chooses each of us to be his own, how to persevere through sufferings with trust in God’s goodness, how things said in the secret of prayer will be known, and how to exist for the praise of God’s glory through receiving and sharing the message of his merciful love. She was trained in trust in God’s providence through the school of the Cross in which she was raised. After the death of her father when she was a young girl, she and her mother were abused by in-laws. She suffered because of an ulcer on her leg for five years. She suffered from opposition to her vocation. She suffered from various Visitation nuns inside the convent. But she clung to Jesus on the Cross and Jesus chose her to be his instrument to reveal to us the love of his Sacred Heart. In a series of apparitions, Jesus told St. Margaret Mary that he had exhausted himself out of love for us, but from “most” he received only indifference, irreverence, coldness, sacrilege and scorn toward his presence in what he called the “sacrament of love,” the Eucharist. He said he was particularly pained that those consecrated to him treated him in this way.  In response to “most” treating him in the “sacrament of love” with indifference by missing Mass as if it makes no difference, Jesus wants us to make him wants us to treat him in the Mass as the greatest difference-maker in our life, as our true priority, as the “source and summit” of our existence, the fulcrum of our week and day. In response to “most” who treat him with irreverence, who just go through the motions or who even pray Mass poorly as if it doesn’t matter, he wants us to treat him with deep piety. In contrast to “most” who relate to him with coldness and lack of enthusiasm, who come to Mass as bored and distracted spectators rather than ardent participants, he wants us more passionate about him at the Mass than the most fanatical sports fans are during a successful playoff run. Instead of treating him with scorn, he wants us to relate to him with grateful appreciation. And rather than receiving him sacrilegiously, without being in the state of grace, he wants us to receive him with souls fully intent on holiness and cleansed of sin. Those of us, moreover, who are consecrated to him have, in a sense, a duty to make reparation for all of those who treat Jesus poorly. If he feels most keenly the lack of love from those who are consecrated, then how much more consoling will be the love of those who are conscious of their special dedication. The best way we train to do so is by receiving Jesus in the Eucharist with precedence, piety, passion, praise and purity — in short, by treating him as he deserves. Every Eucharist, every celebration of the sacrament of his love, we receive Jesus’ own heart as he seeks to transform us to exist, objectively and subjectively, for the praise of the Father’s glory together with Him.
• Jesus wants to give us all the help he knows we need to glorify God in communion with Him by the gift of the Spirit. Jesus asked St. Margaret Mary to take St. John’s place during the celebration of the Mass, to rest her head on his heart and, not only sense his love, but share in it. She felt the Lord take her heart, put it within his own, and return it burning with divine love into her breast, so that her heart, like his, might become a “burning furnace of charity” so that others in seeing this redeemed love will praise the Father.  Jesus wants, in essence, through the Mass to give us the same type of transplant. He wants us to rest our heart on his as he celebrates in the Upper Room and to receive from him his own heart so that we might love God and others as he loves us. Through the prophet Ezekiel, God had prophesied, “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezek 36:24). He said he would do this first by “sprinkling clean water” upon us to “cleanse [us] from all [our] uncleanness” (v. 25), which is what happens in the sacrament of baptism. The Sacraments are how Jesus fulfills the prayer Catholics have lifted up for centuries: “O Jesus, meek and humble of heart, make our hearts like unto thine!”
• Today we see how we’re worth more than many sparrows. God comes to feed us with the only food he deemed worthy of our souls. This is the greatest expression on earth of how we have been chosen, according to the intention of his will, to exist to praise Him together with his Son and his Son’s entire mystical body. We have heard the word of truth, the Gospel of our salvation, and have believed in him. We who have received the Holy Spirit in Confirmation await the post-consecratory epiclesis in which the Holy Spirit descends to make us one body, one spirit, in Christ. This is the first installment of our inheritance, to the eternal banquet, to which the Eucharist not only points but transforms us to be ready to receive. We will pray later, in the words of Eucharistic Prayer IV, about the connection between receiving Jesus in the Eucharist and the fulfillment of our purpose and God’s intention: “Look, O Lord, upon the Sacrifice that you yourself have provided for your Church and grant in your loving kindness to all who partake of this one Bread and one Chalice that, gathered into one body by the Holy Spirit, they may truly become a living sacrifice in Christ to the praise of your glory.” Amen!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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