The Unity of Christ’s Kingdom versus Diabolical Division, Third Monday (II), January 24, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the Third Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Saint Francis de Sales
January 24, 2022
2 Sam 5:1-7.10, Ps 89, Mk 3:22-30

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• On this seventh day of the Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity, focused on making real Jesus’ prayer on Holy Thursday that we all may be one, as the Father and He are one, we have readings and the feast of a great saint that help us to focus us squarely on unity and division.
• In the passage from Second Samuel, we see the leaders of the tribes of Israel come to David in Hebron, where he was King of Judah, asking him to shepherd the children of Israel, too. (Judah is the southern part of the Holy Land, Israel the northern, and each was inhabited by different tribes among the descendants of Jacob). David, who was a uniter by personality and training as a shepherd, agreed and ruled over both kingdoms for the next 33 years. It’s an image of what’s supposed to happen with the “son of David,” Christ, who came to gather the tribes of Israel against the forces that divide and scatter. The Kingdom of God Jesus came to inaugurate is a United Kingdom, where people are in communion with God and each other.
• We see in the Gospel, however, that the devil seeks to destroy that unity and tries to get others, consciously or unconsciously, to cooperate with him in that fragmentation and destruction. The scribes who had come from Jerusalem on foot to Galilee, witnessing Jesus’ exorcisms, couldn’t deny that the exorcisms were occurring, that possessed people were being liberated, that the demons themselves were hailing Jesus as the “Holy One of God.” They couldn’t deny the facts. But they could try to change the interpretation. And because they had already prejudged Jesus not to be the type of Messiah they were looking for, because he didn’t follow their own man-made prescriptions with regard to the Sabbath, to fasting and to other parts of the fence they drew around the Mosaic law, they concluded that since he couldn’t be of God, then he had to be of the devil. That’s why they said that Jesus himself was “possessed by Beelzebul” and was exorcising not by God’s power but by the power of the “prince of demons.”
• Jesus pointed out the absurdity of that claim in some brief parables that not only answer the objections but communicate something really important about the unity that’s meant to reign in his kingdom. “How can Satan drive out Satan?,” he asked. “If a kingdom is divided against itself,” he continued, “that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand; that is the end of him. But no one can enter a strong man’s house to plunder his property unless he first ties up the strong man. Then he can plunder his house.” In other words, the only way he could plunder Satan’s house (his temporary abode in a possessed man) and drive him out of that house is if he had bound up Satan first. If a possessed man — as they were claiming Jesus to be — were battling against the prince of demons and casting demons out from those whom the demons had occupied, then Satan’s kingdom would be defeated. Underneath Jesus’ reply is a crucially important principle of unity, something that President Abraham Lincoln himself would famously cite to try to keep the United States united.
• But then Jesus describes a moral principle with regard to the unitive power of the truth versus the destructive power of lies. “Amen, I say to you,” he said, beginning with the words of a solemn oath: “all sins and all blasphemies that people utter will be forgiven them. But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an everlasting sin.” What is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit and why can’t it be forgiven? Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, in general, is calling something evil good or good evil. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Truth and one blasphemes against him whenever one deliberately or with vincible ignorance calls a lie the truth or a truth the lie. Jesus reminded them of this sin because they were saying “He has an unclean spirit,” that he was possessed, as he was doing God’s work. The same type of sin happens today, for example, with those who want to treat sexual immorality as if it’s sacramental rather than sinful, who want to call those who defend the institution of marriage as God made it “hateful” and “bigoted,” who want to defend unborn girls in the womb from execution “anti-woman” and “anti-freedom,” those who want to call those who are chaste “perverts” and “sexually repressed,” those who care for undocumented immigrants “traitors,” etc. Why is such a sin against the Holy Spirit, against the truth, unforgivable? The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, “There are no limits to the mercy of God, but anyone who deliberately refuses to accept his mercy by repenting, rejects the forgiveness of his sins and the salvation offered by the Holy Spirit. Such hardness of heart can lead to final impenitence and eternal loss” (CCC 1864). The reason why blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is unforgivable is not because God doesn’t want to forgive but because the sinner won’t open up to receive mercy, either because he doesn’t believe he needs it, or because she doesn’t believe God will forgive, or because he doesn’t want to come to receive it in the way God has intended. When someone is convinced that evil is good and a lie is true, the person will not think he or she is in need of forgiveness. When someone is calling Jesus evil and possessed, that person is generally not going to come to ask Jesus for mercy. When someone has convinced himself that destruction of human life is a beautiful act of freedom that should be celebrated, that gossiping is a charitable information service for inquiring minds that want to know, that producing smut is an exemplary public expression of the right of free speech, they’re generally not going to repent. Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is not necessarily a curse against the third Person of the Trinity but can be a hard-hearted refusal to be opened by him to the truth of things and to come to receive the forgiveness that “God the Father of mercies through the death and resurrection of his Son has sent the Holy Spirit among us” to accomplish.
• Today the Church celebrates the 400th anniversary of the death of a saint who shows us how to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in fostering unity in Christ’s kingdom, someone whose whole life testifies to the truth and to the good of Christian communion and evil of disunity. St. Francis de Sales (who died December 28, 1622, but whose feast day, January, comes from the day he was buried in Annecy in 1623) came from a noble family in southeastern France. His father had given him a tremendous education and he graduated with his doctorate in law at the age of 20. By the time he returned home his father had already arranged for him to marry an heiress and become a senator. When Francis told him he had made a promise of chastity and wanted to become a priest, the Father was outraged, thinking his son had lost his mind. A difficult struggle ensued, with Francis trusting in God to find a solution. Eventually the Bishop of Geneva, at the intercession of one of Francis’ maternal uncles who was a priest, obtained for Francis the appointment as second in charge of the Diocese of Geneva, which placated Francis’ father’s sense of pride. Francis was ordained a priest and took up his duties. In addition to the administrative tasks for which he was responsible, he quickly became a much sought after confessor and friend of the poor. The diocese of Geneva, however, was in shambles. Decades of scandals among the clergy had made it very easy for Calvinism to spread throughout the region of the Chablais. The people were so poorly catechized that they were not able to respond to Calvinist arguments. They were, moreover, so angry at the hypocrisy of their local churchmen that they were easily incited to turn on the Catholic faith, run their priests out of town and take up a form of Christianity that at least seemed to be moral. The bishop of Geneva even had to flee the see city and take up residence in Annecy. Some reports said that there were only about 20 Catholics left in the vast region. Nine months after Francis’ ordination, the bishop held a meeting with all his priests, seeking volunteers to send to the region to try to win the people back. He didn’t hide the dangers or the difficulties. The people were not only ill-disposed but hostile: the first priest who had been sent had been attacked and driven from the region. None of the clergy at the meeting stepped forward for what minimally was a tough assignment, but could be a fatal one. Finally, Francis stood up and said, “If you think I am capable of undertaking the mission, tell me to go. I am ready to obey and should be happy to be chosen.” The bishop accepted the proposal, over the fierce objections of Francis’ father, who thought his son was signing up for a suicide assignment — and according to worldly logic, his father was right. At 27 years old, Francis, traveling by foot, set out to try to win back the vast geographic area. United with Christ, he sought to preach the Gospel and undermine and overturn the work of division that the evil one had been accomplishing. The work was rough and dangerous. For his protection, he was ordered to sleep at night in a military garrison. On two occasions, assassins ambushed him along the way, but both times, seemingly miraculously, he survived. On another occasion, he was attacked by wolves and had to spend a glacial night in a tree. But he labored on, despite having little to show for all his effort. He wrote in a letter to a friend, “We are but making a beginning. I shall go on in good courage, and I hope in God against all human hope.” Through meekness, forgiveness and the publication of many tracts, he patiently set forth Catholic teaching, charitably explaining the errors of Calvinism, and tackling head on controversial issues. To those who still harbored anger toward the clerics who committed “spiritual murder” through scandalous behavior, Francis plainly acknowledged the evil and harm done, but warned his readers not to commit “spiritual suicide,” by using those scandals as a means to cut themselves off from the sacraments and the Church. Within the span of five years, the holy “Apostle of the Chablais” had reconciled and evangelized almost the entire region. With the honey of meekness and attractive holiness rather than the vinegar of condemnation, he brought people and the whole culture back, so that the united Kingdom of God would exist anew in the Diocese.
• The great means by which God seeks to unite us in the truth is here at Mass, which was the center of St. Francis de Sales’ life. It’s here that we entrust ourselves to the Holy Spirit who teaches us through the Scripture he has inspired and forms us in the school of the truth to continue the work of teaching all nations. Then the Holy Spirit through the priest changes bread and wine into Jesus’ body, blood, soul and divinity, and through Holy Communion, seeks to make us one body, one spirit in Christ. We become one with the Stronger Man so that, with courage like St. Francis de Sales, we may be capable of undertaking even the most difficult of missions and should be happy to be chosen.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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