The Right Type of Leaven, Sixth Tuesday (II), February 15, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Tuesday of the Sixth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Claude la Colombière
February 15, 2022
Jas 1:12-18, Ps 94, Mk 8:14-21

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• In the Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples with him in the boat to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of Herod. Leaven, we know, is small and almost imperceptible but it gives growth to bread. The leaven of the Pharisees was what we observed in the Gospel yesterday, this incessant desire for signs, for external works of the law, for arguing with Jesus and rejecting him. It’s, as Jesus says elsewhere, their hypocrisy, their being whitewashed tombs, beautiful on the outside but full of filth and death on the inside. It’s their focus on straining out gnats and swallowing camels.  It’s a religious externalism serving to enhance pride. It’s literally a “separation” from others, including sinners, out of the idea that that is pleasing to God. The leaven of Herod means a sensual, political and spiritually worldly approach to life without sincerity in the relationship with God, something we see in St. Mark’s Gospel earlier when Herod just wants to meet Jesus when he hears about him because some said he was John the Baptist risen from the dead. In both cases, their leaven was an absence of real faith. It was not a focus on God but on themselves, on their own works, their own pleasures, their own doubts and questions.
• Jesus then described a different type of leaven, what we might call a divine yeast, shown in the two different miracles of the multiplications of loaves and fish. The leaven Jesus wants is faith, is trust in Him, is confidence that even if the apostles didn’t bring bread into the boat that somehow God would take care of them like he took care of the vast multitudes with the multiplications. Jesus asks us the same question he asked them, “Do you still not understand?” He further asks, “Do you have eyes and not see, ears and not hear?,” bringing back what he said before the interpretation of the Sower and the Seed, basing himself on Isaiah, that he gives us parables to force us to work a little to understand them. The multiplication of the loaves and fish were similar to parables, he implied, that he wanted us to ponder to get their bigger meaning. Jesus wants this leaven of faith to grow in us, so that we trust in him increasingly. He tells us elsewhere in the Gospel that unless we convert and become like little children, we will not enter the kingdom of God. To become childlike is to grow in trust. Sometimes as we age we become more cynical, less faithful, less trusting in God or in anyone else. We become “wise” in worldly calculations but foolish in faith. Jesus wants to give us a different type of growth.
• St. James talks about the bad leaven of growth in succumbing to temptation versus the good leaven of growth through persevering faith in temptation. The one who perseveres faithfully during trials, he says, is “blessed” and will receive the “crown of life” after having been proven. On the other hand, he describes the curse of succumbing to temptation and what it can lead to, death. He first says that no one should say, “I am being tempted by God,” because God doesn’t tempt. He permits temptations so that we may pass the test of temptations with fidelity, but he doesn’t send them. The root of our temptations, St. James describes, is our desires. God has made us desire good things and we always desire things under the “aspect of good.” Thieves desire the good of material possessions. Vengeful people desire the good of others’ not doing harm. Lustful people desire the good of human sexuality and the feeling of love. The problem is that they desire these goods in a disordered way, outside of the hierarchy of goods willed by God. They want property without working for it, or the other’s ceasing to do evil through suffering violence, or sex and love apart from marriage and the love of God. Once we begin to desire things disordinately, we get drawn by those desires to sin, and if we don’t repent, we become corrupt and spiritually die, by making the fulfillment of such desires more important than God. St. James describes the process in the following way: “Each person is tempted when lured and enticed by his desire. Then desire conceives and brings forth sin, and when sin reaches maturity it gives birth to death.” The solution to this growth in sin through caving into our tempted desires is the leaven of the Word of God, not just knowing it, by clinging to it and living it. St. James says that God “willed to give us birth by the word of truth that we may be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.” The Responsorial Psalm builds on this, that the man who takes God’s instruction is blessed: “Blessed the man whom you instruct, O Lord, whom by your law you teach, Giving him rest from evil days. … When I say, ‘My foot is slipping,’ your mercy, O Lord, sustains me; When cares abound within me, your comfort gladdens my soul.” God wants to sustain us, just like Jesus was sustained in the desert while being tempted by the devil, by his holy word, not just known but believed and enfleshed. God wants not only to help the leaven of faith in us to grow but to help us become his leaven to raise up the world.
• One who shows us the fruit of divine leaven as a disciple and apostle is the great Jesuit the Church celebrates today, St. Claude la Colombière (1641-1682), most famous for his having been for a short but crucial time the spiritual director of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, to whom Jesus appeared to reveal the mystery of his Sacred Heart. Even though she had been receiving apparitions of Jesus, there was so much she didn’t understand. But God used spiritual direction to lead her to him. St. Margaret Mary said of St. Claude,”His gift is to lead souls to God” — something that would be great to be able to be said about each of us: that we help others to see God and the way God is working in their life. We know what happened with St. Margaret Mary. As she had been receiving apparitions from Jesus, she eventually confided to her superiors and various priests came in to examine here. Some thought she was crazy. Others thought she was possessed. They hurt her quite a bit and their evaluations caused her huge problems in her community. The priest theologians who came to the monastery were not properly trained to help her. Finally, God sent her St. Claude, who was able to be Jesus’ instrument to tell her that she wasn’t a freak, that she wasn’t being diabolically played, but that this came from the Lord. And then he helped her fulfill what the Lord was asking of her. Here’s what she wrote in her autobiography: “In the midst of all my fears and difficulties my heart, … I was made to speak to certain theologians, who, far from reassuring me in my way, added still more to my difficulties, until at last Our Lord sent the Reverend Father de la Colombiere here. … My Sovereign Master had promised me shortly after I had consecrated myself to Him, that He would send me one of His servants, to whom He wished to make known according to the knowledge He would give me thereof, all the treasures and secrets of His Sacred Heart that He had confided to me. He added that He sent him to reassure me with regard to my interior way, and that He would impart to him signal graces from His Sacred Heart, showering him abundantly over our interviews. When that holy man came and was addressing the community, I interiorly heard these words: ‘This is he whom I send you.’ I soon realized this in the first confession on the Ember days; for, although we had never either seen or spoken with each other, the Reverend Father kept me a very long time and spoke with me as though he understood what was passing within me. But I would not in anyway open my heart to him just then, and, seeing that I wished to withdraw for fear of inconveniencing the community, he asked me if I would allow him to come and speak with me again in this same place. But in my natural timidity which shrank from all such communications, I replied that, not being at my own disposal, I would do whatever obedience ordered me. I then withdrew, having remained with him about an hour and a half. Before long he again returned, and although I knew it to be the Will of God that I should speak with him, I nevertheless felt an extreme repugnance to be obliged to do so. I told him so at once. He replied that he was very pleased to have given me an opportunity of making a sacrifice to God. Then without trouble or method, I opened my heart and made known to him my inmost soul, both the good and the bad; whereupon he greatly consoled me, assuring me that there was nothing to fear in the guidance of that Spirit, since It did not withdraw me from obedience; that I ought to follow Its movements, abandoning to It my whole being, sacrificing and immolating myself according to Its good pleasure. At the same time he expressed his admiration at the goodness of God, in not having been repelled at so much resistance on my part. He further taught me to value the gifts of God and to receive with respect and humility the frequent communications and familiar converse with which he favored me, adding that I ought to in a continual state of thanksgiving towards such infinite goodness. I told him that as this Sovereign Lord of my soul pursued me so closely regardless of time or place, I was unable to pray vocally, and, although I did violence to myself in order to do so, I nevertheless remained sometimes without being able to pronounce a single word, especially when reciting the Rosary. He replied that I was not to force myself anymore to say vocal prayers but to be satisfied with what was of obligation, adding thereto the Rosary when I was able. Having mentioned some of the more special favours and expressions of love which I received from this Beloved of my soul, and which I refrain from describing here, he said that in all this, I had great cause to humble myself and to admire the mercy of God in my regard. But as this infinite Goodness did not wish that I should receive any consolation without its costing me many humiliations, this interview drew several upon me, and the Reverend Father himself had much to suffer on my account. For it was said that I wanted to deceive him and mislead him by my illusions, as I had done others. He was, however, in no way troubled by what was said, but continued nonetheless to help me, not only the short time he remained in this town, but always. Many a time I have been surprised that he did not abandon me as others had done, for the way in which I acted towards him would have repulsed any other; he spared me, however neither humiliations nor mortifications, which gratified me greatly.”
• As we ponder how St. Claude helped St. Margaret Mary not to “be deceived,” who shows us the meaning of the Psalm, “Blessed the Man whom you instruct, O Lord,” under understood the meaning of the Lord’s miracles and became leaven to lead souls to God, we thank the Lord for the gift of our own spiritual directors and ask for the grace to be good leaven raising up the world.  Jesus who is with us in the boat of the Church and is about to implant himself in us as the most powerful leaven of all, to help us become, not like the Pharisees or the Herodians or the Sadducees, but like him, St. Claude, St. Margaret Mary and the saints who glorify him.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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