The Surpassing Righteousness to Which Christ Calls Us, Tenth Thursday (I), June 13, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Thursday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Anthony of Padua, Doctor
June 13, 2019
2 Cor 3:15-4:1.3-6, Ps 85, Mt 5:20-26

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

The following points were attempted in the homily:

• Today in the Gospel, Jesus tells us something that should startle us, especially early in the morning: “Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter into the Kingdom of heaven.” That’s a very tall order.  The Scribes were the experts of Sacred Scripture in its every detail. They consecrated their whole life to knowing the Word of God. The Pharisees were the ones who sought to live the Word of God expounded by the Scribes to the letter. Many of the Scribes were Pharisees and vice versa. They prayed three times a day. The fasted not just the one time prescribed per year but twice a week. They tithed not only the various items that God had instructed but the tithed their whole income. By worldly, even by classically religious standards, their righteousness seemed to be almost unsurpassable. But they were missing something. Their righteousness was fundamentally based on their own efforts, their own study, their own will-power, their own sacrifices. It also featured an extrinsic understanding of being right with God: as long as they did the right things, everything was fine with God. As the converted Pharisee St. Paul would once say back to them, they thought that they were saved by their own works of the law, by their own external adhesion to the Mosaic law, and not by God, not by a faith-filled living relationship with God.
• When Jesus calls us to surpass the righteousness of the Pharisees, he’s doing something shocking, similar today to saying that our holiness needs to surpass the Carthusians and the Poor Clares to enter the kingdom of heaven. What he was doing was not fundamentally calling us to surpass them in memorizing the New Testament along with the Old, in praying four times a day instead of three, in fasting three times a week instead of two, in giving twenty percent of all we have back to God instead of ten. He’s calling us, rather, to three things: first, to have his own relationship to the law in fulfilling the law; second, to grasp that it is all about loving God with everything we have and loving our neighbor as Christ has loved us (which is why we have today’s Alleluia verse, to help us remember this); and to interiorize the law so that our heart is changed, not just our outward behavior. He’s calling us to allow the Word of God, Love incarnate, to become enfleshed within. He’s summoning us to permit God to give us a new heart, to place his law within us as he pours Himself, the Holy Spirit, into our hearts. God had told us through the Prophet Jeremiah that one day he would write his law in our hearts, and that’s precisely what Jesus came to do. That’s what the Holy Spirit seeks to accomplish.
• Today Jesus begins a series of powerful applications of what this looks like, because these are things on which everyone needs to surpass the Scribes and the Pharisees. The first is with regard to the fifth commandment. The Lord says, “You have heard that it was said to your ancestors, You shall not kill; and whoever kills will be liable to judgment. But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment, and whoever says to his brother, ‘Raqa,’ will be answerable to the Sanhedrin, and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ will be liable to fiery Gehenna.” Jesus wants to transform the way we relate to others so that we will love them as he has loved us. It’s not enough merely not to kill others. He doesn’t want us to insult them. He doesn’t want us to hate them. Jesus wants to teach us to love those whom others would be tempted even to murder, to love those who make us angry, to love those who are fools. This is something that he found often in the Scribes and Pharisees and was calling us to surpass. That’s the type of offering God wants us to give him when we come to worship him, which we see in the second part of today’s Gospel. Jesus says, “Therefore” — linking both parts and this is key for us to grasp as we come here today to pray the Mass — “if you bring your gift to the altar, and there recall that your brother has anything against you, leave your gift there at the altar, go first and be reconciled with your brother, and then come and offer your gift.” The type of offering God wants from us is the offering of love, of forgiveness and reconciliation, of kindness, toward his beloved sons and daughters who are our blood or spiritual brothers and sisters. He recognizes that murder begins in the heart, with resentment, with fear, with vengeance, with lack of harmony. If love for others is lacking, he says, our offering to God is in vain. We can’t come to receive the gift God wants to give us if we’ve closed our hearts to the way he wants us to live. Ultimately the offering God calls us to make when we come before him is our “logike latreia” (Rom 12:2), the only worship that makes sense, our bodies, our entire lives, as a holy and acceptable oblation. It’s to put ourselves at God’s total service. And if we refuse to reconcile, then we are not at God’s service. If we’re not loving our neighbor, we’re really not loving God. Our approach to those who have something against us must be similar to the Father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son who was always seeking to reconcile with his son who had squandered everything: that’s the approach we should have toward reconciliation when we have been wronged; the response we have when we’ve done the wrongdoing is obviously straightforward, one of humble contrition. If we think, however, we can just focus on God without reconciling with our neighbor Jesus is telling us today the absolute opposite, and giving us a choice between the “kingdom of heaven” and a “prison” from which we will not be released until we have paid the last penny. This type of reconciliation with others, this type of fraternal, faithful love, was what many Scribes and Pharisees refused to do. They condescendingly disdained their neighbor who didn’t live as outwardly righteous lives as they did. They disparaged the Gentiles as if their entire bodies were meant just to be fuel for the fires of Gehenna. That’s why for many of them their worship was in vain because they refused to allow God to transform them into his loving, merciful image and likeness.
• St. Paul, who was a Pharisee before his conversion, talks about the relationship between old and new in the passage from his Second Letter to the Corinthians we have today for the first reading. He says that many of the children of Israel had a veil over their hearts and that Christ removes the veil when he comes not to abolish but to fulfill the law of Moses. The more we look to Christ, the more we see the real meaning of the law and commandments and are transformed into his image. Christ and his righteousness are the light shining out of darkness into the hearts of believers, changing them. That’s the Christ Paul was preaching as Lord and enslaving himself to us in order to reveal.
• The saint we celebrate today had a righteousness surpassing that of the Scribes and Pharisees. He was a great reconciler. He was one constantly looked on Christ and was able to see how the New Testament was concealed in the Old and the Old revealed in the New. He was one who cooperated with the new law of the Holy Spirit. He became an Augustinian canon at 15 and, because of his memory and faith, a great and precocious Scripture scholar and professor in Coimbra. People marveled. He got to know the Scriptures so well that, a little later, Pope Gregory IX would call him, “The Ark of the Testament,” because he bore God’s holy word within him. Pope Pius XII when he declared St. Anthony a Doctor of the Church dubbed him, “Doctor Evangelicus,” the Doctor of the Gospel. He was great because he enfleshed the word of God and taught others that same word.
• He taught us in the homily that is the breviary reading for his feast today, “The man who is filled with the Holy Spirit speaks in different languages. These different languages are different ways of witnessing to Christ, such as humility, poverty, patience and obedience. We speak in those languages when we reveal in ourselves these virtues to others. Actions speak louder than words; let your words teach and your actions speak.” He did. We see his homily on humility, for example, in so many aspects of his becoming a Franciscan. One day in 1221, when he was 26, some Franciscan friars came to stay at the Augustinian monastery in Coimbra while they were awaiting a ship to take them to Morocco. The Franciscan Order had just been founded by St. Francis in 1209 and had begun to grow in Italy. These Italian friars were heading to the Muslim land of Morocco to take the place of other friars who had been martyred there by the Muslims. Fr. Fernando — his baptismal name was Fernando de Bulhões — was very moved. He desired to accompany them to try to convert the Muslims and, if God willed it, to die in trying to spread the faith. It would have been very easy for him to say, “I’m already a priest. I’m a Scripture Scholar training future priests. I have a comfortable monastery and everything going for me.” He didn’t. Because of his love for God and others, he was willing to leave his comfortable set-up behind in seeking a fuller union with Jesus and his mission for the salvation of the world. He was admitted as a Franciscan, took the name Anthony, and accompanied the friars to Morocco. When St. Anthony arrived in Morocco, he became deathly ill. For a few months he basically couldn’t move from the beach. That incapacitation required him to return to Europe. Even though he was willing to give his life for the Lord, it was not the Lord’s will for him to become a martyr. He wasn’t stubborn about it. He recognized that the Lord wanted him to be a Franciscan but apparently not a martyr, at least not then. After he humbly got back on a boat in Morocco heading to the Iberian Peninsula, a severe storm broke out that basically forced them  eastward, eventually all the way to Sicily. It was there that he heard that St. Francis was meeting with all the Franciscans in Assisi. He crossed over into Italy and went there to meet St. Francis and all his Franciscan brothers. At the end of the general chapter, as everyone was returning to his respective monastery, he asked where they needed him. They really had no idea who he was. They looked at him as the sick Portuguese brother. He told them he was ordained a priest but no one knew that he possessed such incredible talents. He had spent most of his time listening to others and very little time talking. He was assigned to the lonely hermitage of San Paolo near Forli. His main assignment was to wash pots and pans after the common meal. He never complained. He never sought to bring attention to himself. He just tried to sanctify his work, love the Lord, and make as much time to pray in a local cave as he could. But the great light Christ had ignited in him would not long remain covered by a bushel basket. There was a priestly ordination to be held in Forli for Dominicans and Franciscans and there was a reception held at the Franciscan monastery. None of the learned Dominicans had come with a speech prepared for the celebration. As a last resort, they asked Anthony to step forward and say whatever the Holy Spirit moved him to say. They really had no idea what they were about to hear. He began to give a one-hour talk that was so moving, so learned, and so eloquent that all the Franciscans and Dominicans were astonished. He linked together obscure parts of Sacred Scripture into a whole that demonstrated not only a superior grasp of God’s word but an unbelievable capacity to link it to his listeners. The Franciscan superior eventually informed St. Francis of the incredible treasure St. Anthony contained within and St. Francis pulled him from washing pots and pans and gave him instructions to start going from village to village preaching. When he began to preach, he would preach often for hours, opening up Sacred Scripture, calling people to conversion, pointing people toward the Eucharist, getting people to the confessional, inspiring them to love the Lord and others with all they’ve got. He would debate heretics in the center of city squares and call everyone to the Lord. He was so effective in uprooting the errors of his day that were leading people away from God that he earned the nickname “the hammer of heretics.” It’s highly interesting that in God’s plan, when you look at the relics of St. Anthony, his bones remain after nearly 800 years but all his flesh has decomposed except his tongue. His tongue is incorrupt. It’s almost as if the Lord has wanted to bring attention to his tongue, which the Holy Spirit had made such a tongue of fire. It was the sign of his greatest in teaching others to obey the Word of God.
• As we prepare for the Eucharist today, we can focus on how we unveiled for us the wondrous mystery of the Lord’s presence. When he was preaching in Bourges, France, a Jew named Guillard, a very intelligent, rich and highly skeptical man of the Church’s teaching on the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, challenged Anthony to prove it. To believe in something miraculous, he needed something more than the word of a Jewish carpenter 1200 years before. He needed a miracle to believe in the miracle. So he proposed a challenge to Anthony: He said, “Brother Anthony, if by some tangible, outward sign you can confirm the truth you have demonstrated by reasoning, I will embrace what you teach. He was only half sincere. He said, “I have a mule. I will keep him for three days under lock and key and in all that time will feed him nothing. At the end of the third day I will bring him to the largest public square in the city; and there, in the presence of all the assembled people, I will offer him a feed of oats. You on the other hand, will come carrying the Host, which, as you believe, is the true body of the Son of God. If the mule refuses the food in order to prostrate itself before the monstrance, I will become a Catholic and no longer question the truth of the doctrine taught by the Catholic Church.” Anthony took the challenge and fasted and prayed for three days as the mule was starved. A huge crowd was present on the third day. Guillard showed up with all his friends confident of victory. The mule was brought forward as St. Anthony was approaching with the Eucharist. The food was placed before the mule, as Anthony commanded, “In the name of your Creator, whose body I, though unworthy, hold in my hands before you, I enjoin you, O creature deprived of reason, to come here instantly and prostrate yourself before your God, so that by this sign unbelievers may know that all creation is subject to the Lamb who is daily immolated upon our altars.” Without taking any further notice of the food, the mule walked to the feet of Anthony, and, as attested by many witnesses, knelt before the Blessed Sacrament and remained there in an attitude of adoration.” Guillard and many others, vanquished according to their humanity, were reawakened spiritually and sought admission to the faith. Guillard came and got to his knees besides the mule. He eventually paid for a Church to be built at the site of the miracle. The application to us is that if mules will kneel in adoration of the Lord and account him more valuable than food even when they’re starving, so should we reverence Jesus in the Eucharist and come to receive and adore him every day if we can.
• As we prepare to receive him with adoration, we remember that we’re coming to give ourselves as gifts before the Lord as he gives himself to us. He entered our world to reconcile us to himself, even though he had never wronged us, but we had wronged him. He made the first move. He gives the total gift of his love. And he tells us, as we receive that gift, do this in memory of me. Let’s open ourselves up to the gift of Jesus in Holy Communion and the gift of the Holy Spirit whom he will send us together with the Father so that we might by God’s own power do what God commands and have our righteousness not only surpass that of the Scribes and Pharisees, but arrive to the full measure of the justice of Christ by Christ’s own interior help.

The readings for today’s Mass were: