Thirsting for Christ in his Native Place, Third Monday of Lent, March 9, 2015

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, New York, NY
Monday of the Third Week of Lent
March 9, 2015
2 Kings 5:1-15, Ps 42, Lk 4:24-30

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Yesterday, we pondered how Jesus cleansed the Temple in Jerusalem and used it as an analogy for how he seeks to cleanse us, to reconsecrate us his Father’s house, as a place of prayer, as a home where his words of eternal life resound, as a holy setting where his commandments are sought and lived, as a place in which we yoke ourselves to him to experience the full power and wisdom of the Cross. Jesus needed to cleanse the Temple because his Father’s house had become a den of thieves and sin; it had become sordid instead of sacred. Today we ponder Jesus’ coming to the Synagogue of his hometown of Nazareth and doing another sort of cleansing. On this occasion he didn’t make a whip to drive animals out or overturn the money changers’ tables. But zeal for his Father’s house still consumed him and he used the power of his word to call his fellow townies to repent and believe in the Gospel, to conversion and to faith. He challenged them with “fighting words” how the faith of Gentiles, both in the past and in the present, was greater than their own.
• Jesus returned to his hometown synagogue on the Sabbath, opened up the scroll of the Prophet Isaiah, read the section from Isaiah 61 that focuses on what the Messiah will do when at last he comes and then said “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” At first the people were amazed. But then they began to murmur, “Isn’t this the carpenter?” They began to take offense at him because he was one of them and how could one of them actually be the long awaited one? Their hearts began to harden. That’s why Jesus today said to them, “No prophet is accepted in his native place.” Their admiration eventually turned to resentment and hatred. Their hardened hearts soon became homicidal as they tried to murder him by throwing him head first off a cliff. He came to his own, St. John would say, but his own didn’t accept him. They already had fit him in an unthreatening box and they weren’t going to let him escape.
• Jesus gave two examples in the Gospel of the type of open hearts that God expects. The first is the widow of Zarephath (1 Kings 17:7-16). During a famine, God sent the Prophet Elijah to her home. Elijah asked her to prepare for him some water and some bread, but the woman replied that all she had was a little flour and a little olive oil left and she was preparing to make her last meal for her and her son before they would starve to death in the famine. Elijah told her not to be afraid because God would take care of all three of them, that the jar of flour would not be used up or the jug of oil run dry until the Lord sends rain. With trust, the woman did as Elijah said and the three of them survived for three and a half years. Jesus implies in his example that God wouldn’t have found such total trust in Israel and so Elijah had to go to a foreigner, someone who would believe in God enough not to presume he or she knew God’s designs but rather to do what the Prophet commanded.
• The other example Jesus uses is the subject of today’s first reading. Jesus says that there were many lepers in Israel at the time of Elisha, but the only one who was cured was Naaman the Syrian, presumably because he was the only one who would come with sufficient faith to be cured by God. That faith wasn’t easy to come by, as we see in account from the Second Book of Kings. Naaman was a very successful general of the King of Aram’s army and came down with an unbelievable amount of wealth — ten thousand days wages, six thousand gold pieces and ten very precious festal garments — seeking a cure for his leprosy at the instigation of one of the Jewish servants of the Naaman’s wife. He was hoping initially to buy a miracle or to get one done by the very impressive external status of the petitioner. Elisha the Prophet, however, knew that what he needed was the humble faith necessary to allow God to work. So Elisha didn’t even come to the door to greet him, simply sending a note to bathe seven times in the Jordan River. At first Naaman was outraged, thinking he had wasted his time and so much hope coming down, to be asked to do something so simple as bathe in a river when there were rivers back in Syria. But the people in his retinue reasoned with him that if he would have done something hard or spectacular, he should have the faith to do something simple and straightforward. And he had the faith and humility to change and to bathe and on the seventh washing his leprous flesh became baby skin, totally restored.
• That whole miracle points to the type of faith we need to have with regard to the work of cleansing and faith God wants to do in us. In this third week of Lent, the whole Church begins to help catechumens prepare more explicitly for what happens in baptism and to assist all the baptized to revivify our baptismal graces. In Year A, we have the story of Jesus’ meeting the Samaritan Woman at the well and the cry to the Lord to give us his living water always. Today we have the Responsorial Psalm crying out with thirst for the Living God. The healing of Naaman fits into this same baptismal frame. To human logic, the claims of baptism seem preposterous. Just like Naaman initially scoffed at what washing seven times in the Jordan river could do, so we can say with regard to the far greater claims of baptism, “How can a few drops of water on someone’s head and a short prayer [“I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”] really totally cleanse someone’s soul, make someone a temple of God’s presence, incorporate someone into Christ’s mystical body, and implant within the person a stream of Living Water flowing up to eternal life?” But that’s exactly what it does. We’re called constantly to grow in our faith-filled recognition of what happened on the day of our baptism and how it’s supposed to impact our life today. Without a doubt, Naaman would never have forgotten the day he was cured through obeying Elisha and bathing seven times. We should never forget the even greater miracle that happened to us. And we should welcome Jesus within us in baptism, not like the Nazarenes who rejected him, but like the one Nazarene girl did when Jesus took on her own flesh.
• But it’s not only with regard to baptism in which we should have faith but so many other interactions when God has us do something that on the surface seems different than the way we would expect but that has unbelievable consequences for us if we do so with faith.
• We might think that praying, fasting and giving alms are all really small, somewhat inconsequential practices, but when we do them with faith they can conform us to Jesus in his praying, fasting and self-giving.  We might think that for our post-baptismal sins to be forgiven we should have to walk barefoot all the way to California, but Jesus calls us to go to confess our sins to his priests to whom he has given the Holy Spirit for the remission of sins. We might think that in order to get to heaven, we need to do a whole series of absolutely heroic deeds, but Jesus says that we need to love and care for him in the hungry, thirsty, naked, stranger, ill or imprisoned. We might think that for our spiritual nourishment, the most important thing would be to read an entire library of spiritual books, but Jesus says it is to make him in the Holy Eucharist the source and the summit of our life. We might think that to stomp on the head of the devil, there would be a superior way than binding ourselves to him in spiritual poverty, chastity and obedience, but that’s what he calls us to. We might think that to encounter Jesus Christ in the flesh, we might first need to die, but he makes it possible for us to meet him with the raw materials of bread and wine, a priest, the power of the Holy Spirit, some simple words and the proper intention.
• One of the most important parts of the Lenten conversion God is asking of us is that we learn how to trust in him and in what he says and does rather than try, like the Nazarenes, to box him into our own limited categories. We need to approach him with faith rather than hardened hearts. To accept Jesus with honor means to recognize who he is, to thirst for him, to welcome him and what he teaches, and to obey him with faith. This is a type of growth that he wishes to give us as a gift every year. This is a type of cleansing for which he comes, not with a whip of cords but with his mercy. As we prepare to receive him now within ourselves, the place he has deigned to make a tabernacle of his holy presence, his native place since the day of our baptism, we ask him to increase our faith and gratitude in what he has already done for us and in us and to increase our trust and longing for what he still very much desires to do.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Gospel
LK 4:24-30

Jesus said to the people in the synagogue at Nazareth:
“Amen, I say to you,
no prophet is accepted in his own native place.
Indeed, I tell you, there were many widows in Israel
in the days of Elijah
when the sky was closed for three and a half years
and a severe famine spread over the entire land.
It was to none of these that Elijah was sent,
but only to a widow in Zarephath in the land of Sidon.
Again, there were many lepers in Israel
during the time of Elisha the prophet;
yet not one of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.”
When the people in the synagogue heard this,
they were all filled with fury.
They rose up, drove him out of the town,
and led him to the brow of the hill
on which their town had been built,
to hurl him down headlong.
But he passed through the midst of them and went away.