The Response Jesus Is Looking For, 15th Tuesday (I), July 13, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Tuesday of the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of Saint Henry
July 13, 2021
Ex 2:1-15, Ps 95, Mt 11:20-24

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Yesterday we finished a week-long examination of the instructions Jesus gave to the Twelve before he sent them out and we mentioned as an aside that after he had “finished giving these commands to his twelve disciples, he went away from that place to teach and to preach in their towns.” Jesus himself went out to preach. He went out to announce that the kingdom of God was at hand and its corresponding imperative: to repent and believe. He went out to cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers and drive out demons. He went out without gold or silver or copper for his belt, with no sack for the journey, no second tunic, sandals, walking stick. He went out as a Lamb among wolves, as wise as a serpent and as pure as a dove, wishing peace upon all those who met him. And as we pondered yesterday, what he looking for above all was welcome, which meant not a polite invitation to have a cup of tea, but a transformation of life. He was seeking those who could welcome him and in welcoming him welcome God the Father and his whole salvific mission. But he had also prepared the twelve for what they and he would encounter:  those who were hardened and unwelcoming.
• Today Jesus preaches about three different places — Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum — that ultimately were unwelcoming to Jesus. On the surface, these were places that very much seemed to embrace Jesus. Capernaum during his public ministry was actually called his “home town,” his home base after departing from Nazareth. They were the cities where Jesus had worked so many of his miracles. Jesus had called his apostles from these towns, he had preached in these squares and synagogues, he had cast out demons, healed countless sick people, fed two multitudes with a few buns and sardines and yet, even though many were bringing him friends on stretchers and the whole town would be gathered at the door of the house where he was, they still hadn’t really welcomed him. The reason is because they had given welcome only to those parts of what Jesus was doing that had fit into their own categories. They weren’t really welcoming his message and mission. They weren’t really open to change. They had heard his words calling them to conversion, to a new way of life, to follow Jesus in big things and in small, and they responded not with open hearts but hardened ones.
• That’s why Jesus today reproaches the towns for their lack of faith, comparing them negatively to Tyre and Sidon, the debauched metropoles of Phoenicia north of the Holy Land, and to Sodom, one the most notoriously sinful cities in history. “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida!,” Jesus said. “For if the mighty deeds done in your midst had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would long ago have repented in sackcloth and ashes. But I tell you, it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon on the day of judgment than for you.” The word “woe” is not so much a word of anger but of crushed disappointment. It’s if he was saying, “What a tragedy, Chorazin and Bethsaida! What an absolute pity, Capernaum!”  Jesus had come to save them, and his deeds were physical manifestations of greater miracles he wanted to work in their souls, but they didn’t want to cooperate, they didn’t want want to change, they didn’t want to repent and believe.  He likewise said about Capernaum, “Will you be exalted to heaven? You will go down to the nether world. For if the mighty deeds done in your midst had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day. But I tell you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom on the day of judgment than for you.” Jesus had done so much there and yet the people were fundamentally unchanged. They just went on with their unredeemed life as normal.
• It’s somewhat tempting for us to lament what happened in these towns along the Sea of Galilee, but we need to recognize that Jesus has done far greater deeds in New York than he ever did in Capernaum, Chorazin and Bethsaida. What he did there was a just a taste of what he has done here. He teaches every day. He gives us in the Eucharist a far greater miracle than the multiple of the loaves and fish. He gives us in the Sacrament of Confession a much greater healing that the physical cures he worked there, as he not only exorcises the devil’s clutches from our souls but fills us with himself. But at the end of time will he praise us as a city of faith or will he say we haven’t repented and believed? We will say to each of us, “Woe” or will he say, “You welcomed me, repented, and strove to enter the narrow gate into my kingdom?” Today Jesus wants us to learn from what happened in these towns of Galilee and get right again what they got wrong. He wants us to embrace him and his message, to repent and believe in the Gospel, to begin to follow him from darkness into the light, to commence living in his kingdom, living a new life.
• In the first reading today we see what God can do when someone gives even the beginnings of a true welcome of him, his truth, his person. In the first reading from the Book of Exodus, we see the faith of an anonymous Levite woman, who out of love for God and love for her three-month old son, refused to expose him to death, but wanted to do all she could to save his life. She knew that Pharaoh’s command was evil. So entrusting herself to God, she made her baby boy a primitive ark of papyrus, bitumen and pitch and set him on the Nile, praying to God, as we invoked in the Psalm, that those who turned to him in need would live. Little did she know what God’s plans were for her son, that he would be the one who would set his people, subject now to slavery and genocide, free, that he would be the one to lead them back to the promised land, that he would become the greatest type ever of Jesus, the new Moses, who would lead all of us on the exodus from death to life. All she was doing was giving back to God the gift he had given her and that she had welcomed with her whole heart. In receiving Moses, she had received the One who had given Moses to her. Later we see how Moses was rescued.
• How often Sisters you help to make other mothers like the mothers of Moses, encouraging them not to obey those who tell them to it’s better to end their child’s life, but strengthening them to entrust themselves and their child to God. St. John Paul II in Evangelium Vitae frames the entire work of the Gospel of Life in terms of a recapitulation of what happened in Egypt. “The Pharaoh of old, haunted by the presence and increase of the children of Israel, submitted them to every kind of oppression and ordered that every male child born of the Hebrew women was to be killed (cf. Ex 1:7-22). Today not a few of the powerful of the earth act in the same way. They too are haunted by the current demographic growth, and fear that the most prolific and poorest peoples represent a threat for the well-being and peace of their own countries. Consequently, rather than wishing to face and solve these serious problems with respect for the dignity of individuals and families and for every person’s inviolable right to life, they prefer to promote and impose by whatever means a massive program of birth control” (17). But God intervened: “When it seemed doomed to extermination because of the threat of death hanging over all its newborn males (cf. Ex 1:15-22), the Lord revealed himself to Israel as its Savior, with the power to ensure a future to those without hope. Israel thus comes to know clearly that its existence is not at the mercy of a Pharaoh who can exploit it at his despotic whim. On the contrary, Israel’s life is the object of God’s gentle and intense love” (31). And our opposition to the killing of children he frames as a continuation of the work of the Hebrew midwives: “In the Old Testament, precisely in regard to threats against life, we find a significant example of resistance to the unjust command of those in authority. After Pharaoh ordered the killing of all newborn males, the Hebrew midwives refused. ‘They did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but let the male children live’ (Ex 1:17). But the ultimate reason for their action should be noted: ‘the midwives feared God.’ It is precisely from obedience to God — to whom alone is due that fear which is acknowledgment of his absolute sovereignty — that the strength and the courage to resist unjust human laws are born” (73). Often, Sisters, you play the role of the papyrus basket, of Moses’ sister, of the daughter of Pharaoh, and little do you know who these people saved from the river of blood will grow up to be. But you know that each of them was willed directly by God, that each of them has a role in God’s plans. In Moses’ case, the Lord would choose someone born under a death sentence, someone rescued from the river, someone who would become a murderer, someone who was not a very capable speaker, to rescue his people, because Moses himself had been rescued by God. He became a tangible witness to what God could do. And God would eventually pull all of his people from the waters of the Red Sea! Everything began, however, when a woman welcomed a child and through the miracles God did through that one yes.
• Someone else who shows us how to receive God and his word and respond as God desires is St. Henry, the Holy Roman emperor from Bavaria, who died 997 years ago today. The beautiful opening prayer indicates how he went from earthly kingdom to heavenly realms, and not just after his death, but during his earthly life. He knew that the Lord’s kingdom required continuous conversion and he never stopped trying to “turn with” the Lord. Even though he was king, he cared more about being a faithful servant of the King of Kings. He and his wife St. Cunegunda lived in continence and tried to help each other dedicate themselves fully to God. So great was his desire to serve God that he sought to abdicate the crown and become a Benedictine at the Abbey of Verdun, but he was rejected. He has become the patron saint of all those who have been rejected for religious life. After his insistence, the Abbot let him make vows as an Oblate but then under holy obedience commanded him to continue to rule the empire well. And the Lord brought great good out of that rejection, helping St. Henry to conform his will in humble obedience to God’s will. As Holy Roman Emperor he sought always to welcome the poor as if he were welcoming Christ and sacrificed to care for them. He also did all that he could to help the Church carry out its task of witnessing to the Lord and to his mercy before all, founding monasteries and even a Diocese. He sought to help all the people in his kingdom to embrace the kingdom of God and the conversion it requires.
• Today as we hear Jesus speak to us and prepare to welcome him in Holy Communion, we ask the Lord to give us all the help he knows we need to receive him well. We want him to say about us, not “woe” for our hardness of heart, for our lack of conversion, for our failure to repent, believe, and follow him, but rather, “Blessed are they who hear the word of God and observe it.”  Let us ask the Lord to give us, like he gave St. Henry, the grace of total receptivity to his saving words and work, so that he may do in us and through us all the marvels he wishes!

The readings for today’s Mass were:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download