The Qualities of a True Steward of God, 32nd Monday (II), November 12, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the 32nd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass for the Faithful Departed
November 7, 2016
Ti 1:1-9, Ps 24, Lk 17:1-6

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today, in Baltimore, all the bishops of the U.S. have convened for their annual Fall meeting. This year their session is going to focus far less on ordinary business but on how to respond adequately to the scandals plaguing the Church. Today they will have a day dedicated fundamentally to prayer and penance. We pray and do penance with them.
• In today’s readings, there is much for them and for us to ponder with regard to what the Church has been enduring these past several months with what has come to light about the way some clergy have been behaving in the Church over the past several decades. But the word of God today has applications not merely for bishops and priests but for all of us.
• At the beginning of today’s Gospel, Jesus speaks about scandal and forgiveness in such a way that the apostles, overwhelmed by the challenge, cried out to the Lord, “Increase our Faith.” Jesus replied about the power of faith, that if we have even a little faith, we can do the impossible, like transplanting mulberry trees into the sea. If we can do that, then we can live in a way that sanctifies rather than scandalizes and can learn to forgive those who have scandalized us with the same infinite mercy we find in God. Jesus begins the passage talking about scandal and the damage it causes for others’ growth in faith. “Things that cause sin will inevitably occur,” the Lord says, “but woe to the one through whom they occur. It would be better for him if a millstone were put around his neck and he be thrown into the sea than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin.” Jesus is clearly describing the punishment scandalous behavior warrants because scandals can destroy others’ faith and injure severely their relationship with God; they also justly outrage God because they disfigure our representation of him and the scandalously sinful action obviously harms the sinner. At the same time that Jesus mentions a millstone, however, he wants to help unshackle someone from that millstone through mercy. One of the most important parts of our life of faith is our recognition that just as God never tires of forgiving us, we should never tire of asking him for forgiveness and of sharing a similar mercy with others. This is hard. It requires great humility to ask for forgiveness. It requires greater humility to give it. By his words today, Jesus is calling us not merely to give people a second chance, but an eighth chance. In another part of the Gospel he says, depending upon the translation, he tells us that we need to give a 78th chance or a 491st chance (we must forgive “seventy sevens”). This forgiveness doesn’t mean pretending that the offense wasn’t sinful or scandalous; it doesn’t mean keeping or putting the person in a position where he or she can continue to injure others should the person fall again; but it does mean not holding their sin against them in a way that prevents they’re reconciling with God and others. But doing so is hard and to be capable of doing this, we need God’s help through the strength that comes from faith. That’s why we humbly beg, “Increase our faith!”
• In the first reading, St. Paul describes the qualities for the discernment of priests and bishops precisely so that they won’t cause scandal but rather bring people to imitate God. Most of these qualities will pertain to any Christian. He says that they need to be blameless, which is the opposite of scandalous; married only once, meaning that they can live chastely and not be men who had to marry after the death of a first wife, because then probably they wouldn’t be able to live the continent chastity required; with believing children who are not accused of licentiousness or rebellious, because if a father can’t raise his own children in the faith, how can he raise others’ children in the faith?; not arrogant, because he must be a humble servant like Christ; not irritable, because he must love even those who annoy him; not a drunkard because he must be sober and alert; not aggressive, but meek; not greedy for sordid gain, but poor in spirit because the kingdom he seeks is the Lord’s; hospitable because he sees Christ in the stranger saying, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me”; a lover of goodness, so that his virtue is not just in seemingly virtuous needs but comes from a good fruit-producing tree; temperate since he must have self-mastery; just, since he should be right with God and fair with others; self-controlled since he must be disciplined to be a disciple and help form other disciples; someone holding fast to the true message as taught so that by his life he can exhort the faithful and refute opponents; and in short, holy, dwelling in and reflecting the holiness of God.
• When a priest or a bishop or a Christian does not live with these traits, it obviously does impact people’s faith. They have high expectations of those who have been given much in the Lord’s service. We are all held to high expectations because we wear religious habits and cassocks. People justly expect Christians to act like Christ. Mahatma Gandhi was always fascinated by Jesus, whom he said taught like no one else. He would quote the words of Christ, especially from the Sermon on the Mount, very often. Once a missionary asked him, “Mr. Gandhi, though you quote the words of Christ often, why is it that you appear so adamantly to reject becoming his follower?” Gandhi replied, “Oh, I don’t reject Christ! I love Christ! It’s just that so many of you Christians are so unlike Christ. If Christians would really live according to the teaching of Christ, as found in the Bible, all of India would be Christian today.” The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who coined the phrase “God is dead and if he weren’t we’d have to kill him,” and whose thoughts were one of the seeds of Nazism, said something far more severe: “I may have been able to believe in a Redeemer, if I had ever met someone redeemed!” The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council, in the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes) pondered this point when it said, “Believers can have more than a little to do with the birth of atheism. To the extent that they neglect their own training in the faith, or teach erroneous doctrine, or are deficient in their religious, moral or social life, they must be said to conceal rather than reveal the authentic face of God and religion.” In short, others expect us as Christians, but even more as bishops, priests and religious, to behave like Jesus, to speak like him, to love like him, to be merciful like him, and when we don’t, it demoralizes. We have similarly just high expectations of each other. We can be scandalized when fellow priests, or bishops, or religious live in a spiritually worldly way, making decisions as serpents without any glimpse of the purity of doves, speaking more like sailors than they do the Lord. Today Jesus is calling us to a higher standard, reminding us that by faith in him, by his power, we can live up to that standard, so that we might draw people to him by our behavior rather than drive them away. One particular area in which this increased faith is important is in the readiness with which we forgive, because if we fail to forgive, we can often scandalize. We’re the ones who are supposed to show that we know what Jesus stressed, that unless we forgive others, neither will our heavenly Father forgive us our sins. Sometimes in the priesthood and in religious life we find priests and sisters who nourish grudges, who haven’t forgiven even after many years. Today Jesus wants to increase our faith so that we will forgive as frequently and as generously and as from the heart as he does.
• Today we celebrate the feast of a bishop who features in an exemplary way so many of the necessary virtues St. Paul describes to Titus, someone who was a model of forgiveness and reconciliation, and who died trying to bring Christians together and help them overcome one of the worst scandals in history, the terrible schism in God’s Christian family, in direct contradiction to Jesus’ prayer during the Last Supper that our communion might reflect the Trinitarian communion, so that the world might believe God the Father sent the Son and loves us just as much as he loves the Son (Jn 17). St. Josaphat was born Orthodox in the Ukraine in 1580. In 1595, in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Metropolitan of Kiev and five bishops, representing millions of Ruthenians, came back into communion with Rome after the split in 1054, as Josaphat was among them.. Josaphat would eventually become a monk and began to preach in favor of Christian unity in the midst of tremendous opposition — fundamentally political — against reunion with Rome. In 1617, he was ordained Bishop of Vitebsk and soon thereafter appointed Archbishop of Polotsk. There he continued to suffer to heal the scandal of schism and bring about the cause of unity. He had great faith and sought to increase the faith of others. When people were threatening to kill him, he said, “If I am accounted so worthy as to deserve martyrdom, then I am not afraid to die.” When people in the city of Vitebsk were plotting against him, he said, “You people of Vitebsk want to put me to death. You make ambushes for me everywhere, in the streets, on the bridges, on the highways, in the marketplace. I am here among you as your shepherd and you ought to know that I should be happy to give my life for you. I am ready to die for the holy union, for the supremacy of St. Peter and of his successor the Supreme Pontiff.” His enemies got their chance on November 12, 1623. He returned home after prayer to find people attacking those who worked for him. He said to the persecutors, “My children, what are you doing with my servants? If you have anything against me, here I am, but leave them alone.” They began to cry, “Kill the papist! and he was pierced by a bullet and brained with a halberd, as he gave his life for the union offered to us in Christ. Like St. Paul mentioned at the beginning of today’s first reading, he did everything “for the sake of the faith of God’s chosen ones and the recognition of religious truth, in the hope of eternal life that God, who does not lie, promised before time began.”
• The means by which the Lord most seeks to augment our faith each day — so that we might seek union, so that we might live in a way that brings people to him rather than repels people from him, so that we might be merciful as he is merciful — happens here at Mass. He strengthens our faith by what he teaches us in the Liturgy of the Word. He strengthens us even more by entering into us in Holy Communion. We know that if we receive a particle of the host the size of a mustard seed, we’re receiving within Him who can strengthen us to do all things. As we consume his precious blood given for the remission of sins, this is the way by which we’re able to go out to forgive others their sins. This is the means by which we are strengthened never to give scandal but instead become “signs of contradiction,” just like Jesus, capable of bringing people to conversion and to the forgiveness God wants to give that we show by our forgiveness is possible. So today, through the intercession of St. Josaphat, we cry out: Lord, increase our faith!

The readings for today’s Mass were: