Truthful Prophetic Mercy, 18th Monday (II), August 1, 2016

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the Eighteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Alphonsus Ligouri, Bishop, Founder and Doctor of the Church
August 1, 2016
Jer 28:1-17, Ps 119, Mt 14:13-21

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

The following points were attempted in today’s homily: 

• Throughout this Jubilee of Mercy, we’ve been focusing on how Jesus’ mission is to help us to become “merciful like the Father” by helping us to receive God’s mercy in such a way that we’re so thoroughly changed by it that we allow his mercy to overflow through us, together with our own compassion, toward others. We see in today’s Gospel how Jesus’ “heart was moved with pity for the crowd,” or, a better translation of the Greek verb splagchnizomai, he was sick to his stomach when he saw the needs of the crowd. Today he responded by healing and feeding, but as we’ve seen elsewhere, the verb splagchnizomai likewise introduces three other actions: forgiving, teaching and asking us to pray for laborers and calling those praying to be those laborers to grow in mercy by sharing God’s gut-churning mercy for others in these five ways.
• Today we’ll ponder the way the Lord extends his compassion toward us through feeding us by teaching and how he wishes to involve us in that work. In the miracle, which he could have worked ex nihilo, he began with what the disciples could scrounge up, five loaves and two fish. He wanted to involve them in his miracle of mercy. That’s part of his plan from the beginning, as we will see in the life of St. Alphonsus Ligouri, especially through sacred preaching and through the work of bringing people to conversion and extended to the converted the gift of the mercy of the Lord.
• In today’s first reading, we see a false mercy. The “prophet” Hananiah was just telling people what they wanted to hear, rather than preaching to them what the Lord revealed. He told them that the Babylonian captivity that had just begun — as King Nebuchadnezzar had brought away King Jehoiakim and many of the nobles — would end within a couple of years, and rather than bring them all to conversion, he made them proud and falsely confident. The message that God had given to the prophet Jeremiah was totally different, as everyone would find out.
• There are false prophets in every age. There were in the 18th century when St. Alphonsus lived. These were ones who were either laxists not bringing people to repentance or rigorists who were not communicating to them God’s mercy and scaring them from God and his true loving nature. St. Alphonsus, in founding the Redemptorists to preach the mercy of the Redeemer in Missions seeking to bring people to conversion and holiness, indefatigably preached and heard confessions as did so many of his spiritual sons. Eventually when he was 49 and could no longer preach in person as much because of rheumatoid arthritis, migraines, and many other maladies, started to write books, and before he died 42 years later, had written 111, an extraordinary output that flowed from his zeal. His works preach still, two centuries after his beatification (in 1816). At the beginning of Mass we prayed, “O God, who constantly raise up in your Church new examples of virtue,” — referring not to St. Alphonsus but to us and those who have come after him — “grant that we may follow so closely in the footsteps of the Bishop Saint Alphonsus in his zeal for souls as to attain the same rewards that are his in heaven.” The Lord is seeking to raise up in our own day new examples of the virtue of divine mercy that so motivated St. Alphonsus in his day.
• Today as we come together for Mass, we are aware that Jesus has never stopped looking with mercy on the crowds and now, starting with bread wine — God’s gift of grain and grapes and the work of human hands — he makes the greatest miracle of all, the one that brings us to the source and summit of his compassion and makes us capable, in communion with Him who is Mercy incarnate, of doing this mercy in memory of him.

The readings for today’s Mass were: