The Timeless Time to Confess Christ, 25th Friday (II), September 28, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Friday of the 25th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Lorenzo Ruiz and Companions, Martyrs
September 28, 2018
Eccl 3:1-11, Ps 144, Lk 9:18-22

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• In today’s first reading, the sacred author of Ecclesiastes says that there’s a time, a “kairos,” for everything under the heavens, and lists several of them. He shows time more or less as the undulating waves of opposites, from night to day, without end, without direction, almost in a circle of endless repetition. This is what life may seem to those who live life without God: everything becomes a vanity of vanity. But the author then shifts gears and says that God “has put the timeless into their hearts, without man’s ever discovering.” God has placed himself in his eternity within us in a way that far exceeds our knowledge or comprehension. This placement of God happened with the  appearance of Jesus as the Messiah of God in the “fullness of time,” as St. Paul describes in his Letter to the Galatians.
• In today’s Jesus asked his question about what the people were saying about him not because he was curious but because he wanted to lead them on a journey of faith to recognize that the long-awaited time had really come. After Peter, however, moved my God the Father had courageously confessed his faith in Christ, Jesus announced the type of Messiah he would be in the fullness of time: a Messiah who would suffer and die in order to bring us salvation, a Messiah who would summon us to be co-redeemers with him precisely through entering into his suffering, his death, and his resurrection. This is the Messiah we are called in every time and in eternity to confess.
• Someone who did is the man we celebrate today, the first Filipino saint, St. Lawrence Ruiz, and his companion martyrs. Married with three kids and a very good calligrapher, he may have murdered a man in the Philippines; regardless, he was accused of murder and was fleeing the charges and the death penalty that came with them. He got on a boat with Dominican priests, a Japanese priest and a leper and landed in Japan. Soon thereafter he was arrested during the ferocious Tokugowa shogunate. The Japanese sadists went through their normal mind games with their prisoners trying to get them to apostatize and it seems that St. Lawrence asked the question whether his life would really be saved if he denied his faith. Regardless, he didn’t. And when they were about to torture him by hanging him upside down by his heels over a pit with a cut behind his ear so that he would bleed to death over three days, he said, famously, “I am a Catholic and wholeheartedly do accept death for God; Had I a thousand lives, all these to Him shall I offer.” His confession was just as eloquent as St. Peter’s and just as inspired not by flesh and blood but by God the Father in heaven.
• Today at Mass, as we prepare in time to receive the “Timeless One” within our hearts, minds, souls and strength, we ask him for the grace to confess him just as courageously as the martyrs we celebrate today did. That’s a practice that is never inappropriate to every time and place, because, as St. Paul said in 2 Corinthians: “Now is the acceptable time. Now is the day of salvation.”

The readings for today’s Mass were: