Three Conditions for Accepting God’s Revelation, 15th Wednesday (II), July 18, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 15th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Camillus de Lellis
July 18, 2018
Is 10:5-7.13-16, Ps 94, Mt 11:25-27

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

The following points were attempted in the homily:

• Today’s Gospel allows Jesus to continue to guide us as to how we’re called to receive him and his work in our life and how we’re supposed to understand the welcoming others give to Him and to us when we are seeking to proclaim the Gospel in Jesus’ name. Jesus describes that it is the will of the Father to reveal himself to us and to others, but there are three conditions to our and others’ receptivity to God’s self-revelation.
• First, God reveals himself to us in his Son as the Son reveals himself to us by through the Father. Jesus tells us, “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him.” The way we come to know God the Father and the depth of his ardent love is through Jesus’ choosing to reveal him to us, which is a tremendous grace. Jesus is the icon of the Father and also speaks not only of the Father but also what he hears the Father saying. His whole mission on earth was to help us establish this loving bond with the Father, teaching us by his example and explicit instructions to pray, “Our Father.”
• Second, to receive this revelation we must do so not just through spiritual childhood but entering into Jesus’ spiritual childhood. Jesus joyfully exclaims in prayer, “I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike.” We can’t get to know the Father as Father unless we see ourselves not just as children, but his children, and we do that in Jesus. The wise and the clever of this world try to pretend as “grown-ups,” who say, “Thanks, but I’ve got it from here,” who try to be self-sufficient rather than dependent on the Father, who behave like the sons in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the first of whom treats the Father as if he is as good as dead to him and no longer needed, and the second treats him more as a slave master than as a dad. To receive the revelation of the Father we need to be open like children, we need to be receptive and trusting, we need to learn from Jesus, who is not only the revelation of the Father but also the revelation of how to relate to the Father as a beloved Son in whom the Father is well pleased. When Jesus describes the “wise and the clever,” we should note, he’s not castigating intelligence but intellectual pride. We see this type of pride in the Assyrians in today’s first reading from the Prophet Isaiah. God was delivering the kingdom of Judah into their hand in order to bring his people to conversion, but they responded with arrogance. Putting Assyria’s attitude into words in their mouth, God describes their intellectual pride through his prophet: “By my own power I have done it, and by my wisdom, for I am shrewd,” the Assyrians say. “I have moved the boundaries of peoples, their treasures I have pillaged, and, like a giant, I have put down the enthroned. My hand has seized like a nest the riches of nations; As one takes eggs left alone, so I took in all the earth.” There was no openness to God. They were too wise and clever, to powerful and wise on their own, too shrewd, too giantlike in their own estimation to need God. Jesus was also clearly referring to those scribes and Pharisees whose intimate knowledge of the Scriptures actually prevented rather than facilitated their hearing him speaking to them live in the Word made flesh. They not only resisted Jesus’ words, they not only pretended that even his miracles were done by the power of the devil, but they ended up culminating their resistance to God’s word by breaking the fifth and seventh commandments and conspiring to frame and to kill Jesus. Jesus calls us not to be clever like them, but to progress to full stature, to mature manhood, precisely through spiritual childhood. Last week we celebrated for the first time the feast of SS. Louis and Zelie Martin, the parents of St. Therese Lisieux, and it was first in their home that God taught St. Therese the way of spiritual childhood to which we’re all called. We ask their intercession that we might grow in that same school! Jesus actually uses an expression in Greek of the childlike that means “non-speaking” or “no-word,” pointing to the stage of infancy before the child is able to express himself  in words. That doesn’t mean they’re babblers, but that they’re defined not by their own words, their own thoughts, their own opinions, but by accept Jesus’ word, which they receive, live in accordance with, and announce. It’s not their own takes that matter, but God’s. They’re those who are able to enter into the mysteries because they’re docile, because they accept Jesus, who is the revelation of all the hidden things he himself announces. Jesus, “the Son,” wishes to reveal the Father to all of us but only the childlike, only the docile, only those with good soil accept that revelation enfleshed in Jesus.
• Third, we need to receive that revelation also with joy, because if we’re not receiving God’s revelation with joy, we’re not receiving it anywhere in its fullness, because Jesus came so that his joy might be in us and our joy complete. In today’s prayer, Jesus exclaims, “Yes, Father, such has been your gracious will!” He rejoices in it. He rejoices in the Father’s will throughout, even when it would lead to us saying, “Not my will, but thy will, be done!,” while sweating blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, when he was entrusting himself to the Father from the Cross, when he was leaving the tomb, when he was sending the Holy Spirit with the Father, when he was calling each of us. Likewise we’re called to rejoice at the will of God, even when at a human level it’s excruciating. That’s what truly childlike trust leads us to do. This is essential for our living out our Christian obedience well, not to mention our promises and vows of obedience in the priesthood and religious life respectively. God wants to help us to do his will with cheerfulness, even when it’s not easy.
• The saint the Church celebrates today, St. Camillus de Lellis, is an icon of the type of conversion to spiritual childhood to which our faith calls us. When he was young, he picked up many of the bad habits of his Neapolitan father, a mercenary soldier, most notably his terrible temper. With his father, he joined the military as a means of handling his aggression, but it only increased his violence. When he left military service because of a failed campaign and a serious leg infection, his violent streak had only grown, not to mention he was now a gambling addict. He was hired by the Capuchins as a laborer, and, thanks be to God, one of the Capuchins saw some goodness in him and patiently pushed him to conversion and to trust in Christ’s power to make something good of him. At 25 he converted so thoroughly that he wanted to spend the rest of his life serving God through the Capuchins, but because his leg injury was incurable, he was refused. He was cared for in Rome by the Hospitallers of St. John in such a way that he used his organizational skills, talents, and charity to revolutionize the type of care that was given to incurables in their clinic. And under the guidance of his spiritual director, St. Philip Neri, he began to organize around himself a group of men who would care for the sick. This became the Ministers of the Infirm that now are known as the Camillans. They took a fourth vow to care for the sick even at the risk of their life, something they routinely did in caring for those with the bubonic plague and other infectious diseases. St. Camillus taught his brothers in religious life how to care for Christ in the sick and so great was his focus on Christ in the sick that he would literally treat them as if he were handling Christ, something expressing sorrow to him for all his past sins and begging mercy. He took seriously and literally, like a child would, Christ’s words, “I was ill and you cared for me.” When St. Camillus couldn’t walk to see the sick, he would crawl on the floor. He was someone who after his conversion sought to treat others as they deserved as images of Christ, to love others with the same mercy with which Christ had embraced him, to welcome Christ at that depth, and to walk or even crawl humbly with God, open to the help he needed in every moment.
• The great place we learn to say with every cell of our body  “Yes, Father! Such has been your gracious will!,” together with Jesus, is here at Mass. This is the place where we say, “I give you praise, Father, Lord of Heaven and Earth.” The word translated, “I give you praise, Father,” is better translated, “I gratefully avow, Father.” Jesus was vowing, consecrating, committing himself to the Father with gratitude over his plan. Mass is the place we do so. Mass is the place where we become more childlike. I’ve always loved Psalm 43 that priests pray at the foot of the altar in the extraordinary form of the Mass. It begins, “I will go up to the altar of God to the God who rejuvenates me with joy.” Every time we approach Mass we become more childlike, we fill ourselves not with our own words but the words of the Church, the bride and body of Christ that we make in unison with him. The Mass is the place of the revelation of Jesus’ word and the fullness of his divine love. Together with St. Camillus and all the saints, we rejoice to be here, we gratefully renew our vows to God, we praise him or his gracious will, and we ask him for all the graces we need, like trusting children, to spend our lives as living, loving commentaries of that holy grace and holy will!

The readings for today’s Mass were: