The Suitable Helper God Gives, Fifth Thursday in Ordinary Time (I), February 11, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Thursday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of Our Lady of Lourdes
February 11, 2021
Gen 2:18-25, Ps 128, Mk 7:24-30

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• “It is not good for the man to be alone.” These words from today’s first reading come in the Genesis account after God says, throughout creation, “It is good,”  “It is good,”  “It is good,”  “It is good,”  “It is good,” and with the creation of the human person,  “It is very good.” Finally God exclaims,  “It is not good for the man to be alone,” but he waited to make this judgment, we can say, until man himself had had this awareness. Even though man was in relation with God and with the animals he had named, there was still something missing. He needed a “suitable partner,” a “fitting helper” for him. And that’s what God gave him in the creation of Eve. God created such a fitting helper, so that the two of them could help each other as the image of God, live in true communion, and grow more and more into God’s loving image. This points to two existential realities: first, each of us needs help and it’s not good for us to be without this help; second, we are created as a helper for others. We are created as fitting helpers likewise always in need of suitable help.
• We also see in the passage the basic complementarity at work in this helping and being helped. God didn’t create merely someone to kill time with, or even a generic helper, but rather a “suitable helper,” a “partner,” someone who makes up for our weaknesses with strength and someone who draws from us our strength to remedy his or her weaknesses. God created Eve out of Adam’s side, to show that they stand side-by-side, equal, before God. The rib symbolizes what covers the heart (the loving center of the person) and the lungs (what is necessary to breathe and survive). Adam exclaims, “Finally this one is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh,” a Hebrew expression meaning “strength of my strength and weakness of my weakness,” that they are like each other in strengths and weaknesses and need to help each other. The type of help that is needed is not just in terms of a “hand” in ordinary life, but with regard to their living as the image and likeness of God. They can’t grow in love without each other and without the analogy of human love, Adam had already discovered that he couldn’t really receive and reciprocate (however asymmetrically) divine love. The most suitable help given is with regard to their living in a fully human way in the divine image. That’s what human marriage, par excellence, is supposed to be, when a man and a woman, like Adam and Eve, fittingly help each other to become who they are. That’s why Christ raised marriage to the dignity of a Sacrament, to give his help so that they might resemble the love in the heart of the Trinity, which Christ came as Bridegroom to make possible anew.
• But the help we need extends to more than marriage. It’s not good for any of us to be alone, we all need fitting helpers, and we all need, to some degree, the complementarity between man and woman to remedy the ways in which, by original differentiation, we are not fully human. That’s why gender ideology is so harmful to human anthropology, because it suggests masculinity and femininity are mental conceptions rather than divinely ordered, complementary realities. St. John Paul II talked about the “archetypical masculine” and the “archetypical feminine” and the way that men receive love by giving love and women give love by receiving love and how man’s relative strengths in complementarity to woman’s relative weaknesses, and woman’s relative strengths to man’s relative weaknesses provide the support we need to grow as God’s image. This applies to agape (Christ-like sacrificial love) and philia (love of true friendship) just as much as to eros (romantic love). Man’s courage confronting fears and the unknown, for example, can encourage women to similar boldness and women’s receptivity to the person can complement man’s task-oriented personality. This type of normal, healthy interaction takes place among brothers and sisters in the family, among dads and daughters, moms and sons, among friends of opposite sexes and in ordinary daily interactions. For those of us who are priests and religious, living ordinarily solely among men or solely among women, we cannot forget the importance of this complementarity for full human thriving in the divine image and must resist any attempt to pretend that faithful chastity means no or minimal interaction with those of the opposite sex. Chastity forms us to love with charity (sacrifice), purity (seeing God in the other)  and piety (reverencing God in the other). Without chaste friendships with women, priests risk becoming cold, insensitive functionaries; without chaste friendships with men, religious women risk becoming overly sentimental and petty. And when chaste, non-exclusive friendships form between religious men or priests and religious women, their complementary spiritual gifts can help each other too; religious woman teach religious men how to be alone before God, how to be receptive rather than Pelagian before his graces, how to build communion in depth rather than in superficial activity or pleasures; religious men teach religious women how to wipe the dust off their feet and move on rather than nurse injuries and how to take risks for Christ and the faith. While acknowledging how the devil always wants and strives to corrupt something good and holy, at the same time we have to acknowledge that priests and religious are not exceptions to God’s statement “It is not good for the human person to be alone,” and “I will make for the person a fitting helper.”
• This need for a fitting helper is likewise seen in today’s observation of the World Day of the Sick. In his Message for today, Pope Francis wrote, “The experience of sickness makes us realize our own vulnerability and our innate need of others. It makes us feel all the more clearly that we are creatures dependent on God.” Sickness, in other words, makes us recognize we need God and others. We see this reality at play in the beautiful interaction in today’s Gospel. At first glance it seems a little harsh, but Jesus in an almost brutally masculine way was helping the Syro-Phoenician mom of a possessed girl to grow in faith, and she, with her beautiful femininity, not only drew forth the Lord’s loving and miraculous generosity, but his extraordinary compliment for her receptive faith. St. Matthew’s account of this scene gives us many more details than St. Mark does today. When this Canaanite woman first approaches Jesus asking her for a miracle for her daughter, the Lord ignores her. When she harasses the apostles begging for their intervention and they ask Jesus on her behalf, Jesus stresses he was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, not to pagan women in Phoenicia. When she continues to pursue and falls down begging, “Please, Lord!,” he replies by saying, “It’s not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.” But she still doesn’t give up. She retorts, “But even the little dogs eat the scraps that comes from their master’s table.” She reminded him that he was the Good Shepherd even of puppies. “Please, Lord, for even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table of their masters.”  At this, Jesus replies, “Woman, great is your faith” and performs an immediate exorcism on her daughter at a distance. Jesus behaved in this way precisely because he loved the woman and was helping her to grow in the type of persevering faith and prayer that God wants to develop and see in all of us. Her feminine, maternal persistence led to one of the greatest compliments Jesus is ever recorded giving. And that woman’s great feminine faith was a means to draw greater faith from the apostles.
• Pondering the fitting helper God gave Adam as well as a maternal intercessor with regard to sick children brings us somewhat inexorably to today’s feast of Our Lady of Lourdes. God chose Mary to be the new Eve, the mother of all the living. She identified herself as the “ancilla Domini,” the handmaid of the Lord. It is never good for man to be alone and hence she was created, in a sense, to accompany God’s son, the God man, according to his humanity, from the first moment of the incarnation onward. He wasn’t alone in the womb. He wasn’t alone in the manger. He wasn’t alone in the perilous journey to Egypt. He wasn’t alone as a boy in Nazareth, even after the death of St. Joseph. He wasn’t alone even on Calvary. And it was there that, through excruciating pain, he reiterated that it is not good for the human person to be alone, entrusting all of us through the beloved disciple as Mary’s loving sons and daughters and her to us as our spiritual mother. And like the mother in today’s Gospel, with intrepid faith in Jesus, she continues to intercede for us, that we may be freed of the evil one, and in Lourdes, that we may be freed of physical diseases. When we realize our own vulnerability, as Pope Francis says, and our innate need of others and dependence on God, Mary is there to accompany us with her human motherly heart and to help us grow in faith through entering into her dependence on God for everything.
• “It is not good for man to be alone.” And the suitable help God made for Adam was not just Eve. It was not even merely Mary, the new Eve. God made himself as a suitable helper, entering into the human race, in order by his humanity to restore us to the divine image and make us partakers in his divinity. And where he carries that out each day is here at the altar. We know that Jesus in the Gospel quoted the words of the Book of Genesis after Adam rejoiced at the creation of his wife, “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two of them become one flesh.” St. Paul, after citing that phrase, will tell us in the fifth chapter of his letter to the Ephesians “This is a great mystery, but I speak in reference to Christ and the church.” Human marriage is based on Christ’s marriage to his Bride the Church; because Christ will never abandon us, sacramental marriage is indissoluble; because Christ is faithful, human marriage is faithful; because Christ’s marriage with us is fruitful, generating newborn Christians in the baptismal womb of the Church, so human marriage increases and multiplies. To understand what happens in the Eucharist, we need to look at it in this spousal key. The early Christians used to illustrate this reality between marriage and the Eucharist in their architecture — as we’ll see when we get to Rome — covering the altars with a baldachin just like ancient beds were covered, to communicate that the altar is the marriage bed of the union between Christ the Bridegroom and his Bride, the Church. It’s here on this altar that we, Christ’s bride, in the supreme of love, receive within ourselves the body, the blood, of the divine Bridegroom, becoming one-flesh with him and made capable of bearing fruit with him in acts of love. This is the means by which we enter into one flesh union with Christ. This is the way by which we receive within Christ’s love for us and become more capable of sharing that type of love with each other. This is the greatest help of all and something that leads us to say, with the words of today’s Psalm, “Blessed are those who hold the Lord in awe!”

The readings for today’s Mass were:

Gospel Mk 7:24-30

Jesus went to the district of Tyre.
He entered a house and wanted no one to know about it,
but he could not escape notice.
Soon a woman whose daughter had an unclean spirit heard about him.
She came and fell at his feet.
The woman was a Greek, a Syrophoenician by birth,
and she begged him to drive the demon out of her daughter.
He said to her, “Let the children be fed first.
For it is not right to take the food of the children
and throw it to the dogs.”
She replied and said to him,
“Lord, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s scraps.”
Then he said to her, “For saying this, you may go.
The demon has gone out of your daughter.”
When the woman went home, she found the child lying in bed
and the demon gone.

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