The Spiritual Poverty That Helps Us Prioritize People Over Pigs and Pride, 4th Monday (II), February 1, 2016

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the Fourth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass for Religious
February 1, 2016
2 Sam 15:13-14.30;16:6-13, Ps 3, Mk 5:1-20

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today on this penultimate day of the Year of Consecrated Life, we have a chance to ponder together the importance of spiritual poverty and how it fosters true charity. It’s only the spiritually poor that can readily grasp the importance of people over material possessions or individual peace and security. The vow of poverty taken by consecrated men and women allow them truly to be of service to others because they’re unencumbered by the desire to preserve what they have, making it possible for them to be free to serve those in needy without counting the cost. Let’s see how relevant this is by entering into today’s readings.
• The Gospel is about more than one more dramatic exorcism from Jesus. It points to something that needs to be exorcised from all of us in every age. After Jesus frees this man from a legion of demons — and a legion in the Roman army was 600 troops — by casting them into a herd of 2,000 pigs who, now possessed, ran off a cliff and drowned in the Sea of Galilee, the people of that pagan region of the Gerasenes didn’t rejoice at the liberation of the man who used to gouge himself with stones, break chains that attempted to bind him, and terrorize the people of the region; they didn’t come to Jesus to ask him likewise to free the other possessed people in the region, or to cure their sick or to teach them; instead, they asked him to leave their region. Jesus was bad for business. They worried that if he stayed he might next endanger their sheep, too, or their grain, or other aspects of their livelihood. They essentially cared more for the swine they had lost than the brother they had gained.
• This is not a problem just for ancients. Still today, people can give possessions primacy over people, allowing people to be disturbed, even possessed, as long as their possessions are left undisturbed. Pope Francis wrote about this in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium: “How can it be that it is not a news item,” he asks, “when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?” For many people, the stock market is more important than people dying through neglect. And this is one of the greatest ways the devil seeks to possess multitudes, through the concupiscence of the eyes or materialism. We remember the way he tempted Jesus in the desert to set his sights on material bread, turning into bread a stone hewn and covered by desert sands to resemble bread, to become a baker instead of a savior, to focus on his stomach more than his soul, on himself more than God. But Jesus refused, saying we live on more than bread, but by every word that comes from God’s mouth. This is what uniting ourselves to Jesus’ spiritual poverty through the professional of the evangelical counsel of poverty makes possible.
• People are more important than things and we must remember this and live by it. We’re in a culture today in which if a human being is still very much alive but in a persistent vegetative state that many think that we need to let the person die in order to save more money for the care of others, but what this really means is to make profits for some by allowing people to die. It’s to put things before love, possessions before people. And when possessions become dominant, we ask Jesus to leave just like the Gerasenes did, because Jesus is constantly telling us to treat the poor the way we would treat him. And if we would ignore a man’s dying of exposure or resent rather than rejoice at a possessed man’s liberation what we’re essentially saying is we don’t care if Jesus were to die of exposure or if Jesus were to be gashing himself with stones — attitudes that already show that we don’t want to have room for Jesus, we really don’t want him to stay.
• We see a similar objective and subjective dehumanization at work in what’s pointed to by today’s first reading. On Saturday, we heard God through Nathan tell King David that the sword would never depart from his house and today we see how David’s son Absalom, many years after David’s quadruple sin, raised the sword to try to take his father’s kingdom. It would have been very easy for King David to have responded to the betrayal of his son with anger and pride. He could have said, “I have killed people by the tens of thousands and defeated Goliath. I am the greatest warrior and general in the history of this nation and have forgotten ten times more than Absalom and his partisans will ever learn about warfare. I’ll teach my son and every other insurrectionist a lesson they’ll never forget.” But he didn’t do this. His son was more important than his kingdom. He realized that if he put up resistance in Jerusalem, many innocent citizens would end up losing their lives, and he recognized that their lives were more important than his kingdom. He recognized that Absalom’s betrayal was a penance for his own betrayal of God many years earlier. He entrusted himself to God and left the city in penitential fashion, with his head covered and his feet exposed. Even when Shimei started to curse and stone David along the path out of the city and Abishai asked David for the permission to “lop off his head,” David refused, because that person’s life was more important than David’s pride. David simply entrusted himself and his fate to God. How much civil rulers need to learn from this example! Over the course of history and still today, people have been repeatedly used as pawns in their ruler’s disputes. When rulers’ pride or possessions are threatened, they have declared war on each other, not even knowing the names of the soldiers who will die defending their honor, not knowing the mothers who will weep for their sons, the wives who will weep for their husbands, the children who will mourn their slain fathers.
• Pope Francis pondered this point in a homily at the Domus Sanctae Marthae a couple of years ago. He said that because David was such a brilliant man of government and warfare, he knew that a war against Absalom in Jerusalem would be brutal and many would die. So he made a choice to save his people, so that they and the city wouldn’t be destroyed. His first attitude, the Pope said, “in defending himself was not to use either God or his people, something that indicates the love of this king for God and his people. He was a sinful king — we know his story — but also a king with a very great love. He was so attached to God and to his people that we wouldn’t use either God or his people for his own benefit. In the ugliest moments of life it can happen that in desperation one tries to defend himself as he can by using God or others, but David didn’t do this.” God was more important that his pride and possessions. People were more important than his pride and possessions. And this is what spiritual poverty allows us to achieve.
• Today the same Jesus who cast the demons out of the swine comes to cast himself into us. When we ask, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?,” he replies that he hasn’t come here to destroy us but rather to sanctify us. He has come not to torment us but to teach and spiritually toughen us. He will not tell us to be quiet but to tell us to proclaim from the rooftops his Gospel. He wants to cast himself into us that we will all rush out and not drown in the Sea of Galilee but bring others to bathe themselves in baptism and in the Living Water coming from his pierced side. As this Year of Consecrated Life draws to a close with tomorrow’s feast of the Presentation, we beg him not to depart from us but to remain with us and to give us the grace to announce not just to our family but to all those he wants as members of his family what the Lord in his mercy has done for us.

The readings for today’s Mass were: