The Work The Lord Asks of Us, 21st Wednesday (II), August 28, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 21st Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Augustine
August 28, 2024
2 Thess 3:6-10.16-18, Ps 128, Mt 23:27-32

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, St. Paul helps us to ponder the importance of work, a subject that’s very important for us as we begin the work of a new semester and some of those present begin the transition from university studies to full-time employment. The Thessalonians thought the end of the world was coming so that they had stopped working. Paul called them to imitate him in his hard work, who, after spending all day preaching the Gospel and helping those who were coming to him, would spend his nights doing the arduous work of tent making so that he would show everyone else by his diligence the importance of the virtue of hard work in their life.
• We remember that work was part of God’s plans from the beginning. At the beginning of time, even before the Fall, God had given us a three-fold vocation to work: to fill the earth and subdue it, to have dominion over all creatures, and to increase and multiply. After the Fall, this work would be toilsome, we’d do it with sweat on our brows and women would have pains in childbirth, but work itself would remain an essential element of the redemption. The reason for that is because by our work we cooperate with God in perfecting ourselves. There are always two dimension to work, something that’s distinguished in most romance languages by two different expressions “to do” or “to make”: to take the Latin terms, the first is facere (fare in Italian, faire in French, hacer in Spanish, fazer in Portuguese), which means transitively to make something like a desk or a chair; the second is agere (agire in Italian, agir in French and Portuguese, actuar in Spanish), which means intransitively to make oneself in the process of making something. When we work well, seeking to do things as well as we can, to finish on time, we build ourselves up in virtue. When we work poorly, not concerned with the final product or who will use it, when we’re lazy, we injure our character. St. Gregory of Nyssa, one of the early doctors of the Church said that we are our parents through our actions and the habits they form, and one of the most powerful means of that type of generation happens through our work. That’s why St. Paul insists upon it as he does.
• “If anyone is unwilling to work,” the apostle underlines, “he shouldn’t eat.” Notice, first, what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t state that if someone can’t work because of a serious disability or because she is an infant or is 114 years old, that person shouldn’t eat. Nor does he say that if someone has been laid off and despite searching every day for a job still hasn’t found one, that that person shouldn’t eat. He says, “If anyone is unwilling to work.” That’s the big issue for St. Paul. We should all be willing to work and when we have the capacity to work, we should be striving to do so. This is true even for someone who is rich and strictly speaking doesn’t have to work in order to have food on the table.  This is true also for those who are retired. It’s not a time for decades of vacation wasting time watching soap operas or obsessing about golf. Those who are retired can be grateful they no longer have to work with the intensity and pressure they once did, but they should be using their time to do another type of work, to do good, to help others, to volunteer, to care for those in need, to build up their parish or their community, to tutor and to pass on wisdom.
• St. Paul’s words on not enabling and feeding someone “unwilling to work” are very important for us to hear in our culture, because in many places our culture is changing. Whereas once people looked to America as the place of the American dream, where by hard work someone who is poor can become rich and enrich the lives of others, today it is becoming increasingly in many places a culture of the handout, where people who can work try not to, in order to live off of the work of others, where people talk about a universal basic income providing money to those who want to play video games all day, where a few try to enter our country not to work but in order to get welfare, free health care, free education and everything else free, where some hope to get a minor injury on the job so that they can apply for disability and start collecting, where others who are hurt without trying to get hurt nevertheless take advantage of a leg injury to collect for the whole rest of their life while they would still be capable of lots of other types of work, where an 18-year-old kid told me in one of the parishes I led that he was hoping to get laid off so that he could collect unemployment. I saw something recently on one of the news sites that said — it’s hard for me to believe — that more people of working age are not working in the United States now than are working. And it’s changing the fiber of our country. This isn’t a rich/poor issue, it’s not a Democrat/Republican issue, it’s a moral/immoral issue. The United States was built on hard work of generations and if the present generations just want to live off of the hard work of their forbears, rather than imitate it and build upon it, then the country will weaken from within from the vice of indolence. God calls us to work and to sanctify that work, sanctifying ourselves and others through that work. These are important thoughts to ponder as we approach Labor Day on Monday.
• That brings us to the second point. One of the most important forms of work that we are called to by God is to engage in our sanctification in response to his grace. The Psalm tells us today, “Blessed are you who fear the Lord, who walk in his ways! For you shall eat the fruit of your handiwork.” The Lord wants us all to eat the fruit of the hard work of reverentially walking in his ways, of following his paths, of crossing the road as he does with self-sacrificial love. Growth in the life of faith is hard work. It’s hard to be faithful to prayer. It’s hard work to get involved in charitable activity. It’s a challenge to continue studying the faith. Sometimes getting through a homily may feel like a workout! It’s hard to forgive, to turn the other cheek, to pray for those who persecute us, to conquer our fears and defend the faith when it’s attacked and to share it in season and out of season. But when we do the sometimes strenuous work of walking in the Lord’s ways, God promises us that we will eat the fruit of that handiwork, and not just experience the joy that comes from hard work here on earth, but enjoy it forever at the eternal banquet.
• This is a path that the Scribes and the Pharisees did not take. Today Jesus gives his sixth and seventh and seven woes in their regard (the first three were on Monday, the middle two yesterday). He calls them hypocrites (actors) for pretending to walk in God’s ways but actually walking in their own ways and leading others into the pit with them. Today he uses two images. He compares them to the whitewashed tombs that would be on the sides of the roads every Spring. Since if one touched a tomb the person would be ritually impure for the triennial pilgrimages up to Jerusalem, the Jews would paint white all the tombs along the road side so that someone couldn’t possibly bump into them by accident. In the sunshine they could be quite beautiful, but inside, Jesus says, they still had filth, decay and dead bones. That’s what the Scribes and Pharisees were like, he suggested. They seemed to be stunningly pious on the outside, but inside they were filled with death, duplicity and evil-doing. He illustrated the point by the last of the seven woes. He said that on the outside they were claiming to want to venerate the prophets God had sent his people, lamenting that their ancestors had rejected and killed them, yet on the inside they were preparing to do the same things to Jesus, “to fill up what [their] ancestors measured out.” To return to the work analogy, the Scribes and the Pharisees on the outside seemed to work very hard in observing all of the minutiae of the law, but what they were doing was similar to the work of an employee who’s always at his desk, always typing on the keyboard, always seeming to work hard, but instead of accomplishing the company’s business, is not just wasting the company’s time by typing out personal emails, not just giving the company a bad name by some of his communications, but ultimately undermining the business by his failure to do what he should have been doing.
• The saints are the ones who, in contrast to the Scribes and Pharisees and in imitation of St. Paul, really do God’s work. Today we have one of the greatest saints in history. St. Augustine initially opposed the work God was trying to do in his life and, despite all his diligent study and practice of rhetoric, discovered, as he wrote at the beginning of his famous Confessions, that God has made us for himself and our hearts are restless, without peace, until they rest in Him. After the death of his father when he was 17, he sought to work for ego, his libido, and ultimately for gods of his own making. But having discovered the true God after resisting him for long, he sought to make up for lost time. He described his dissipative form of work in Book X of his Confessions, in a passage that I think is one of the most eloquent in the history of writing. He penned, “Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things that you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would not have been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.” He describes how the work he did searching for God in creation and creatures, how he tuned out God’s voice, light, odor and food, about of his eyes, ears, smell, taste being addicted to the things of this world. God, however, eventually broke through, and when his restless heart discovered the true God so “late,” he desired to make up for lost time.
• The “work” Augustine needed to do was ultimately to “believe in the One [God the Father] sent,” as Jesus described in the Bread of Life discourse we’ve been considering over the summer. He needed, in response to God’s grace, to make the leap of faith. He needed to repent, to die to his idols, and to turn to God and receive his mercy. That was not a one-time work but a lifetime one, that grew in stages. When we think about St. Augustine’s conversion, many of us can think about the dramatic circumstances that occurred in his life in Milan, after 15 years of sorrowful prayer by his mother, St. Monica. But as Pope Benedict, perhaps the most famous student of Augustine in history, said at St. Augustine’s tomb in Pavia in 2007, the work of Augustine’s conversion was continuous and can be mentioned in three phases.
• The first phase is the one most known, after he had rejected the faith of his mother and sought it in worldly wisdom, in Manichean philosophy and in the art of rhetoric. One day in Milan, when he was 32, as he was weeping over his state in the back yard of his friend Alypius, he heard what sounded like kids singing from a neighboring yard saying, “Tolle et legge,” “Take and read.” He thought it was a strange game for kids to play, but finding no kids, he considered that it was a message perhaps from an angel. So he took up the Sacred Scriptures and began to read what his eyes found first. It was a passage from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans that helped him to realize that he needed to stay awake perpetually in God’s presence.  “It is the hour now for you to awake from sleep. For our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed;  the night is advanced, the day is at hand. Let us then throw off the works of darkness [and] put on the armor of light; let us conduct ourselves properly as in the day, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in promiscuity and licentiousness, not in rivalry and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the desires of the flesh” (Rom 13:11-14).  That passage seemed like it was written precisely for him — as it indeed it was, for him and for us! — and it gave him the courage from God finally to leave the long night of spiritual sleep and the darkness of the flesh behind and live with the Lord in the day. He received that word “not as the word of men, but as it truly is, the word of God,” and it went to work in him through faith. And his interiorization of God’s word was so great that he became one of the greatest commentators of it, in word and witness, in the history of the Church. We, too, need to do this work of conversion, turning from the works of the flesh and living according to the Holy Spirit.
• But that famous conversion was only the first stage in Augustine’s lifetime work of repenting and believing. When he returned to Africa after his mother’s death, he founded a monastery for which he wrote the rule and began to write some of his great theological works. It was a perfect situation for him, it seemed, and he was cranking out works for God’s glory. One day when he had gone to visit a friend in the small city of Hippo, however, he was attending Mass and the elderly bishop asked the people to pray that the Lord would send him someone who could help him with his preaching duties in Latin, because he had become too infirm to preach. The people looked around and saw in the crowd Aurelius Augustinus, once the greatest rhetoric professors in the empire and now a monk, and proposed him. Augustine didn’t want to have anything to do with that work, which would require giving up a lot of his writing in order to care for ordinary people with very ordinary concerns. But he sensed that it was the Lord calling him to be humble and, like the Lord, begin to live and work for others. “Christ died for all,” he read in St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, “so that those who live should not live for themselves, but for him who died for them” (2 Cor 5:15). And so he made the great sacrifice, being ordained a deacon and a priest and eventually, after the bishop’s death, bishop and successor. And it was from that point that he took on the work of becoming an icon of God in his love for his people. We, too, need to recognize that all of our gifts are not meant to be used for ourselves but for God and in him for others.
• The third stage of his conversion, according to Pope Benedict XVI, was when he recognized, very late in life, that everything flows from God’s mercy, not from his own works. This third major conversion happened when Augustine was making his “retractions” of everything he had written, to correct what he now saw as his errors. When he looked back at his famous commentary on the Beatitudes — perhaps the most famous commentary on them of all time! — he saw that one of its major flaws was that he focused too much on our actions to become poor in spirit, meek, pure of heart, peacemaking, compassionate, hungry and thirsty for holiness, and willing to suffer for the faith. He focused too little, he recognized, on how without God we can’t live the beatitudes as they’re meant to be lived, that they’re all a grace of God’s mercy. Everything in our life is meant to be a response to God’s grace and mercy, and God gives us the help he knows we need to do what he asks and commands. That discovery of mercy is part of how St. Augustine grew to recognize the “Beauty ever ancient, ever new.” We, too, in all our work need to know that it all flows from God’s mercy, that all our capacities, talents, opportunities, virtues come ultimately from him, that we can’t do it on our own, but that God gives us those opportunities so that ultimately together with him the summit of his creation, us, whom he pronounced in the beginning “very good,” can be perfected.
• Today on St. Augustine’s feast day we come to God to enter into the most important work of all time, Jesus’ life-saving passion, death and resurrection. This is the mix of what God has given — the fruit of the earth and of the vine — and the “work” of human hands, the joint offering of Christ the Head and Bridegroom and the Church the Body and Bride. This is where we eat the fruit of God’s handiwork and our own, as we unite all our sacrifices to Christ’s on the altar. This is where Jesus, the Resurrection and the Life, from within raises our dead bones and brings us fully alive, so that we’re not whitewashed sepulchers but radiant temples. This is where God ultimately wants to give us the gift of continual conversion, as he calls, shouts, breaks through our deafness, flashes, shines and dispels our blindness, breathes his fragrance upon us and allows us to taste him so that we can hunger and thirst for more, touching us so that we can burn for his peace, the only peace that will ever satisfy our restless hearts!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download