The Truthfulness and Spiritual Poverty Needed to Proclaim the Gospel, 25th Wednesday (II), September 26, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 25th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of SS. Cosmos and Damian, Martyrs
September 26, 2018
Prov 30:5-9, Ps 119, Lk 9:1-6

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 sends out the Apostles to “proclaim the Kingdom of God” by word and deed. In the first reading from the Book of Proverbs we see two essential elements for that proclamation in every age. The credibility of the messenger depend on them.
• The sage who prays turns to God and begs, “Two things I ask of you, deny them not to me.” The first is truthfulness: “Put falsehood and lying far from me.” This is echoed in the Psalm when we pray, “Remove from me the way of falsehood,
  and favor me with your law” and “Falsehood I hate and abhor.” Earlier in the passage we have an allusion to Eve, when Proverb says, “Add nothing to his words, lest he reprove you and you will be exposed as a deceiver.” That was at the root of Eve’s sin. She added to the word of God, who had instructed her and Adam not to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good or Evil, but as we see in Genesis, when she told the Serpent what God had commanded, she added, “and neither shall you touch it.” That happened because either she wasn’t paying close attention or was an embellisher. In either case she failed to appreciate the importance of each word God had said. She failed to recognize that “every word of God is tested.” When Christ sends us out he sends us out as disciples of him who “came to give witness to the Truth,” as he said to Pontius Pilate. He who ultimately is the Truth. And the devil is the “father of lies,” who always wants to get us to add or subtract to God’s word, to do anything except live off of every word that comes from the Father’s mouth. Jesus praised Nathanael for being “an Israelite without guile,” and he wants us all to be without guile. In the present scandals we are experiencing in the Church, perhaps the biggest part of it is the suspicion that some bishops are simply outright lying, lying to their priests, lying to the faithful, lying to themselves and to God. The people of God can fathom that some priests are so psychologically and morally ill that they abuse rather than serve those entrusted to them. They can fathom some bishops and priests in supervisory roles are cowards and don’t do the hard but necessary thing to root out evil. They don’t like it, they don’t accept it, but such failures are common enough that they aren’t shocked when some fail in these ways. But it’s so contradictory when they see people seeing to lie. A couple of weeks ago, at a conversation with journalist friends, a few brought up how dispirited they are that some very prominent bishops seem to have been lying about what they knew or didn’t know. Bishops who have a reputation for being uber-competent, highly-connected, micromanagers seemed to be the only priests in their dioceses unaware of the rumors, for example, against former Cardinal McCarrick. If these bishops had, in their denials, minimally admitted that they absolutely should have known what they apparently didn’t know, if they had given evidence that they felt stupid, naive and betrayed, their denials, my friends said, may have been credible. But their denials featured none of that, they lamented, but rather mimicked the implausible disavowals of politicians caught in scandal. “My teenage son lies better about his dog-eaten homework,” one said. “They can’t even lie with conviction,” another added. Christ calls his Church to be truthful, to say “yes” when we mean “yes” and “no” when we mean “no,” telling us everything else comes from the devil (Mt 5:37). Lying is not a sin of weakness, but calculation. How is it that members of clergy can become deliberate deceivers? One way is when they get so used to “mental reservations” that partially obscure truth that those mental reservations expand until there’s basically no truth left. It’s incalculably destructive when men of God get the reputation for speaking like the “father of lies.” (Jn 8:44). The suspicion that some bishops aren’t telling the truth is clearly a principal cause in the lack of trust the Church is now facing. “A bishop can do no greater disservice to his flock than to lie,” a priest friend wrote back in 2002. “Lying is immeasurably more destructive than scandal given by sexual turpitude, jobbery, or peculation. Any lie, regardless of gravity or occasion, gives his hearers reason to believe that the apostles lied about Christ and that the Church is lying when she claims to be a reliable transmitter of divine teaching. If a bishop, a successor of the Apostles, has lied to me about what he knew about a priest before re-assigning him, why should I believe that he is telling me the truth when he says that Christ rose from the dead, or that it is God’s will that I refrain from sex outside marriage?” This is one of the reasons why those who announce the Word of God must demonstrate total transparency and verifiable truthfulness. To be icons of Christ the Truth incarnate. Otherwise no one will believe anything clergy say, including the Gospel. This is one of the reasons why the whole Church must pray, “Put falsehood and lying far from me.”
• The second thing that the sage asks is, “Give me neither poverty nor riches; provide me only the food I need, lest, being full, I deny you, saying, ‘Who is the Lord?,’ or, being in want, I steal and profane the name of my God.” The request is for a total trust in God’s providence, for we cannot serve both God and mammon. If we have more than we need, the trust we need to have in God’s care can disappear as we place our faith, hope and love in mammon and what mammon can obtain. But he’s also not asking for destitution, nothing whatsoever. He’s asking us for what Jesus taught us to pray: “Give us today our daily bread.” Jesus is describing that trust in God’s providence necessary in those who proclaim God’s kingdom when he instructs the apostles in today’s Gospel, “Take nothing for the journey, neither walking stick, nor sack, nor food, nor money, and let no one take a second tunic.” They needed to proclaim by how they dressed, walked, eat and slept that they trusted in God who promised to care for them more than for the lilies and sparrows. Jesus himself didn’t even have a pillow to lay his head. Together with the apostles, they often didn’t have even meager supplies for meals before Jesus’ miracles. But over the course of time, one of the corruptions that enters the Church is too much dependance on money. We focus more on all that’s needed to maintain what we have rather than relying on God’s riches and preaching. Pastors can bite their tongue in proclaiming the Gospel lest they offend contributors. Bishops listen to lawyers who are trying to protect Church assets than they sometimes do to God through conscience when they’re aware of what’s happening to victims. The Church needs some money. We can’t be Good Samaritans if we can’t pay innkeepers. But sometimes, as Pope Francis says more generally about the economy, money can begin to rule. Similarly the wealth of the Church can sometimes scandalize people. It’s hard to proclaim the Gospel to the poor when one arrives in a Rolls Royce. That’s why the Church as a whole, and each of us, must never ease to pray, “Give me neither poverty nor riches; provide me only the food I need.”
• Today the Church celebrates the feast of Saints Cosmas and Damian, twins who were doctors and eventually martyrs in the early Church. They were called anargyroi, or “penniless ones,” because they never charged for their medical services at a time when many doctors were charlatans taking people’s entire savings on one invented “remedy” after another. What they had freely received from the Divine Physician, they generously and freely gave for others. Even though they could have made money, they were satisfied with having only the food they needed. And they were truth tellers. They told the Church about Christ. They told the truth about the condition of patients. One of the things that can sometimes plague doctors and nurses is that often they have to bear “bad news” to people regularly. Some are tempted, lest they hurt someone’s feeling, to soften the reality of situation or even to hide the truth for them at the request of family members. But it’s so important for human dignity and love to give people the truth in a charitable way, not to hide it. The same thing goes spiritually. We need to be able, like John the Baptist, to speak forthrightly, “It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.” Sometimes we have to wrap the hard truth in velvet, but we have to give people the truth. Saints Cosmas and Damian are intercessors for doctors and for all of us. Ultimately their martyrdom is the greatest witness of the truth. St. John Paul II wrote in Veritatis Splendor, published 25 years ago this year: “Christ reveals, first and foremost, that the frank and open acceptance of truth is the condition for authentic freedom: ‘You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free’ (Jn 8:32). This is truth which sets one free in the face of worldly power and which gives the strength to endure martyrdom.” Martyrdom is the eloquent exaltation of the inviolability of the truth. “The Church proposes the example of numerous Saints who bore witness to and defended moral truth even to the point of enduring martyrdom, or who preferred death to a single mortal sin. In raising them to the honour of the altars, the Church has canonized their witness and declared the truth of their judgment, according to which the love of God entails the obligation to respect his commandments, even in the most dire of circumstances, and the refusal to betray those commandments, even for the sake of saving one’s own life.… Fidelity to God’s holy law, witnessed to by death, is a solemn proclamation and missionary commitment usque ad sanguinem, so that the splendour of moral truth may be undimmed in the behaviour and thinking of individuals and society. … By their eloquent and attractive example of a life completely transfigured by the splendour of moral truth, the martyrs and, in general, all the Church’s Saints, light up every period of history by reawakening its moral sense. … Although martyrdom represents the high point of the witness to moral truth, and one to which relatively few people are called, there is nonetheless a consistent witness which all Christians must daily be ready to make, even at the cost of suffering and grave sacrifice. Indeed, faced with the many difficulties which fidelity to the moral order can demand, even in the most ordinary circumstances, the Christian is called, with the grace of God invoked in prayer, to a sometimes heroic commitment.”
• Today as we celebrate this Mass, we turn to God the Father who gives us neither poverty nor riches but the food we need. He announces to us his tested word so that we can abide in truth far from falsehood and lying. And then he sends us out, fed by Christ his son, to continue to announce proclaim his kingdom.

The readings for today’s Mass were: