The Qualities of a Christian Disciple and Christian Leader, 4th Friday (I), February 8, 2019

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• • Today, as we come to the penultimate lesson of the Letter to the Hebrews on which we’ve been pondering for the last four weeks, the author helps us to ponder the characteristics of a Christian who keeps his eyes firmly fixed on Jesus and of a Christian leader who guides people to Jesus. These are lessons we see very much on display in the life and death of St. John the Baptist from today’s Gospel and in St. Josephine Bakhita, the saint whom the Church remembers today.
  • The first reading highlights five qualities that the sacred author appealed to Christians to excel in even in the midst of the persecution they were enduring. The first was brotherly love. Christians are always to be distinguished first and foremost by the love that we have together, which is likewise a sign that God sent Jesus and loves us just as much as he loves Jesus (Jn 17). Jesus calls us to love one another as he has loved us (Jn 15) and to care and feed each other out of love for him (Jn 21). When we keep our eyes firmly fixed on Jesus the guide and perfecter of our faith, we see him in others and love him in others. The second is hospitality. Not only do we sometimes “entertain angels,” but we welcome Christ himself, who identifies with every stranger we take in. Third is a particular care for those in prison, just as Jesus himself was imprisoned and called us to visit him in the disguise of anyone imprisoned (Mt 25). The first Christians were steadfast in caring for those who had been imprisoned on account of the faith, on account of their poverty, or other reasons. They sought to “redeem” or buy back the freedom of those in slavery or in debt. They risked their lives for those in prison, identifying themselves as Christians during times of persecution. But our care for those in these circumstances is always supposed to be excellent. Fourth, Christians were distinguished by their purity, for the pure of heart see God in others. That’s why the author tells them to honor marriage and never let the marriage bed be defiled but adultery or immorality. Christ the Bridegroom teaches us how to love faithfully and we should never commit adultery in the covenant of love with him by adulterous or sinful sexual thoughts or deeds. Lastly, we’re called to be grateful and content with God in our life, rather than love money and seek to place our faith, hope and love in mammon. As we’ve focused on earlier in this Letter, we Christians permit even the plundering of our property because we have a better possession, namely God. When we’re firmly fixed on Christ as our pearl of great price, we’re not overly attached to the stuff of this world. Those are the qualities that the author wants us to focus on.
  • With regard to Christian leaders, he focuses on three attributes. The first is that they speak the word of God. The second is that the teach us how to live and die well. The third is that they instruct us by their example of faith in all circumstances, knowing Christ is always the same regardless of changing times and worldly values, and so our fidelity must similarly be the “same yesterday, today and forever.”
  • When we look at the life of St. John the Baptist, we see someone who was the greatest of all the prophets speaking the word of God. He showed us to live what he was preaching, namely to repent and believe, to make straight the paths of the Lord, and to follow him when at last he indicated him as the Lamb of God. He showed us how to die in fidelity to the Lord until the end. His faith has always been placed forward for us to imitate, so that, like him, we might point out the Lord, allow him to increase as we decrease, with gratitude that even though we’re not worthy to untie his sandals, he has made us worth of so much more. We see moreover that he himself was imprisoned, that he sought to help Herod and Herodias honor the marriage bed and keep it undefiled, that he was unattached to money and material benefits but to the truth, that he trusted in God has his helper, his light, his salvation, his life’s refuge.
  • Today we’re celebrating the feast of a woman who similarly demonstrated many of these lessons, who excelled in love even when she had received a lifetime of the lack of it, she was hospitable even when she was beaten and rejected, she was mindful of other slaves after her liberation, who was pure and betrothed herself to Christ, who took the vow of poverty free of love of money, who spoke the Word of God, who died in the holiest of ways amid suffering, and whose faith every Christian is called to emulated. St. Josephine Bakhita was born in the Darfur region of Sudan about 1869 (there were no records and no one knew for sure). When he was only 7, she was kidnapped by Arab Muslim bandits, forced to convert to Islam, and then sold into slavery on five different occasions. As was the custom with Sudanese slaveowners at the time, she was repeatedly beaten as a little girl even if she was prompt in doing what was asked. On one occasion, one or her masters showed up with flour, salt and razor blades to brand her. With the flour, the owner sketched on the black skin of her breasts, belly and arms 114 intricate designs and then with the razor blades cut into her skin according to those patterns. While she was bleeding and in enormous pain, the master then poured salt into the wounds so that they would never heal and she would always be branded. To those wounds were added another 40 indelible scars over the course of her enslavement. Eventually she was sold to the Italian consul in Khartoum. This was the first time she wasn’t beaten when she was told to do things. When the political situation destabilized, the consul needed to leave the country and he took Bakhita — a name that means “fortunate,” given to her by one of her owners, because she couldn’t remember the name her parents had given her, so great was the trauma of her capture and her beatings — with him. He gave her to the service of friends having arrived back in Italy, where she helped to raise a baby as a nanny. When this family was preparing to return to the Sudan after the political situation had improved, they entrusted Bakhita and the little girl to the care of the Canossian Sisters in town.
  • It was there that Bakhita was really exposed to Christianity for the first time. Her reaction to seeing a bloody Italian crucifix was unforgettable. She recognized that the one whom Christians adored as Lord and Master understood her pain, because he had been lacerated in his scourging just as severely as she had been repeatedly whipped and then sliced up with razor blades. When the family returned from the Sudan to take Bakhita and their daughter with them to Africa, Bakhita refused. A lawsuit followed that both under Italian law and a Sudanese liberation of slaves found her to be free and insofar as she was now over 18, she could stay. She was baptized with the name Josephine Margaret and Confirmed, made her first Communion from the hands of the future St. Pius X, and was eventually accepted as a Canossian Sister, where she served for the next 44 years as a cook, sacristan and portress. She was always so grateful for the teaching of her new true Parón or Master and always sought not only to live according to that wisdom by to pass it on to others. Even though she had never received much education, the school girls used to line up at the door of the school just for her to pat them on the head. When people would ask her how she was doing, particularly in times of severe illness and pain, she’d simply respond with a smile, “As the Master desires.”
  • Pope Benedict wrote about her as as an example of hope-filled persevering faith in his 2007 encyclical Spe Salvi. “The example of a saint of our time can to some degree help us understand what it means to have a real encounter with this God for the first time. I am thinking of the African Josephine Bakhita, canonized by Pope John Paul II. She was born around 1869… in Darfur in Sudan. …She was kidnapped by slave-traders, beaten till she bled, and sold five times in the slave-markets of Sudan. Eventually she found herself working as a slave for the mother and the wife of a general, and there she was flogged every day till she bled; as a result of this she bore 144 scars throughout her life. Finally, in 1882, she was bought by an Italian merchant for the Italian consul Callisto Legnani, who returned to Italy as the Mahdists advanced. Here, after the terrifying ‘masters’ who had owned her up to that point, Bakhita came to know a totally different kind of ‘master’—in Venetian dialect, which she was now learning, she used the name ‘paron’ for the living God, the God of Jesus Christ. Up to that time she had known only masters who despised and maltreated her, or at best considered her a useful slave. Now, however, she heard that there is a ‘paron’ above all masters, the Lord of all lords, and that this Lord is good, goodness in person. She came to know that this Lord even knew her, that he had created her—that he actually loved her. She too was loved, and by none other than the supreme ‘Paron,’ before whom all other masters are themselves no more than lowly servants. She was known and loved and she was awaited. What is more, this master had himself accepted the destiny of being flogged and now he was waiting for her ‘at the Father’s right hand.’ Now she had ‘hope’ —no longer simply the modest hope of finding masters who would be less cruel, but the great hope: ‘I am definitively loved and whatever happens to me—I am awaited by this Love. And so my life is good.’ Through the knowledge of this hope she was ‘redeemed,’ no longer a slave, but a free child of God. … Hence, when she was about to be taken back to Sudan, Bakhita refused; she did not wish to be separated again from her ‘Paron.’ On 9 January 1890, she was baptized and confirmed and received her first Holy Communion from the hands of the Patriarch of Venice. On 8 December 1896, in Verona, she took her vows in the Congregation of the Canossian Sisters and from that time onwards, besides her work in the sacristy and in the porter’s lodge at the convent, she made several journeys round Italy in order to promote the missions: the liberation that she had received through her encounter with the God of Jesus Christ, she felt she had to extend, it had to be handed on to others, to the greatest possible number of people. The hope born in her which had ‘redeemed’ her she could not keep to herself; this hope had to reach many, to reach everybody.” She wanted to help others to learn to live by faith too.
• The great source of fraternal love, the most important hospitality, the deepest liberation, the greatest marital covenant of all, the greatest treasure, we find in the Holy Mass. This is where we hear the Word of God spoken to us, where we consider with hope the end of life, where we seek to grow in a faith that others can imitate. This is where we meet and become one with our Light and Salvation, our Parón, the one who is the same yesterday, today, and forever, the Lamb of God whom John the Baptist continues to point out. This is where we learn how to live “as the Master desires.”