Using Our Liberation to Live by Faith and Love, 13th Tuesday (I), July 4, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Chapel of the Vincentian Seminary, Krakow, Poland
Tertio Millennio Seminar
Tuesday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati
July 4, 2023
Gen 19:15-29, Ps 26, Mt 8:23-27

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today as the Americans among us celebrate our Independence Day, as we just viewed the film Liberating a Continent and how eastern and central Europe was liberated from communism thanks to the moral revolution ignited by St. John Paul II, it’s an opportunity for us to recall that our freedom is not just a freedom “from” but principally a freedom “for.” As St. Paul wrote to the first Christians in Galatia, “For freedom, Christ has set us free,” and therefore, he told us, “stand firm and do not submit again from the yoke of slavery” (Gal 5:1). In today’s readings we focus on the Lord’s desire to liberate us from sin, death and fear, and today’s feast of Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati helps us, especially young people, to ponder how we ought to use our freedom in faith for love of God and others.
• In the first reading, in the encounter between the Angels of God and Lot, we see God’s will to save us from destruction. It’s a scene that is one example of the entire salvific plan of God. The Angels tell Lot to get up and get on his way, together with his wife and daughters, prior to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah because of the sins of those in those cities. When Lot hesitates, the angels “by the Lord’s mercy,” took him, his wives and daughters by the hands and led them out of the city, telling them to flee for their lives and not to look back with affection toward what they were leaving. We know well the infamous sins that were happening in Sodom and Gomorrah; God’s saving Lot and his family from the destruction is an indication of how he tells us to flee from sin, to get out of near occasions, to get out of the conflagration of lust of the eyes, lust of the flesh and pride that lead to self-destruction, and not to look back. When Lots’ wife disregarded the angels’ instructions and looked back, with curiosity or affection, to what she was leaving behind, she was turned, Genesis tells us, into a “pillar of salt,” a Hebrew idiom that basically means she died, being reduced to the salts carried in the human body. Yesterday, if we didn’t have the proper readings for the Feast of St. Thomas the Apostle, we would have heard Abraham’s pleading with God not to destroy the cities if he could find 50, or 40, or 30, or 20, or 10 just people there. The fact that he evidently couldn’t find even ten righteous people communicates how bad things were there. We’re not even sure that Lot and his family would be numbered among the good, because they were being saved on account of Abraham. Ultimately, however, God acts in the world because he was able to find one just man, his Son, who had taken on our humanity, and for that reason saves the whole world from a destruction symbolized by the fiery furnace that became Sodom and Gomorrah.
• In today’s Gospel, this very saving will of God seems to be in question. While the apostles — the early Church — was being attacked by waves such that experienced fishermen thought they were about to die, Jesus was asleep in the boat. It’s a sign of just how tired physically he must have been that he was able to sleep while the boat was rocking and water was coming over the sides of the boat to soak him and the apostles. The twelve cry out, “Lord, save us! We are perishing!” In St. Mark’s parallel account, the disciples awaken Jesus and ask, “Do you not care that we are perishing?” Ultimately they doubted the Lord’s saving will, they wondered aloud in their fear whether God in fact cared for them and would act even if they were perishing. Jesus’ whole incarnation is a response to that doubt. God so loved the world, as St. John reminds us, that he sent his only begotten Son so that we might not perish but might have eternal life. But they needed to believe in his saving will. Jesus responded to their petition with a gentle challenge to the depths of their faith,  “Why are you terrified, O you of little faith?”  Sometimes the Lord Jesus puts us in the plight of those in the boat precisely so that we may grow in the trust that flows from faith. Sometimes he even appears to be asleep precisely to help us grow in faith and come to the fulfillment of faith in eternal life with him.
• Like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Jesus’ calming of the winds and the seas is much more than a demonstration of the Lord’s power over the forces of nature. He who with a word created the heavens and the earth, the seas and all they contain, with a word could calm them, as he did. Neither is today’s Gospel a manifestation of the failure of the apostles to believe in this power of Jesus. They knew that he had the power, which is why they woke him up in the first place. They had already seen him cast out demons, cure Simon Peter’s mother-in-law and others who were ill, heal lepers, forgive the sins and paralysis of a crippled man, and straighten a man’s withered hand. There were no doubts about Jesus’ omnipotence. The point of his calming the wind and the seas was to show what faith in him does, it calms the storms inside us. Even if the seas and winds are raging, when we know the Lord is with us, we are able to remain calm, knowing that ultimately nothing can harm us.  By the calming of the storms and the seas, he was showing us he could still the tempests of sins within. If God the Father was willing to allow his Son to be brutally killed so that we might live, he was showing that he would to respond with love in every circumstance, by giving us what he knows we need. But we need to have faith in him and in the power of his love. The apostles were anxious in the boat because they were paying more attention to the waves and to the winds around them than to the presence of Jesus with in the boat. The same thing can happen with us. We need to focus more on Christ than on the problems we confront. This is the mark of a life of faith. Jesus turns to us in the midst of whatever hardship we are experiencing and says, “Why are you terrified, O you of little faith?” To believe in him means not just to trust in his power, but to have faith in his goodness and love and that that goodness and love perdures. When we live with him justly, when we trust in his mercy, when we believe in his saving will, we are able to be truly ourselves.
• Someone who lived with this type of Christian serenity flowing from faith, someone who took advantage of the liberation Christ had gained for us so as to have his whole life be a commentary of “faith working through love” (Gal 5:6), is Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, who died 98 years ago today at the age of 24. He had a big influence on St. John Paul II. He was born in Turin 19 years and a month and a half before Karol Wojtyla was born in Krakow and when St. John Paul II visited the cemetery where Bl. Pier Giorgio was buried in Pollone in 1989, the year before Bl. Pier Giorgio’s beatification, he said, “I, too, in my youth, felt the beneficial influence of his example and, as a student, I was impressed by the force of his Christian testimony.” He was fascinated by a young man who, like him, loved the outdoors, loved the mountains, full of personality, joy, charity and courage.  The audacity that flowed from his Christian faith allowed him not only boldly to climb steep rocks in the Italian alps, but to to buck his father’s atheism, to spend all night in adoration, to become a man of prayer and daily Mass, to care for the poor and the sick, and even to face death from polio loving others to the end. In 1977, here in Krakow, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla visited an exhibition for young people hosted by the Polish Dominicans. The future Pope urged Cracovians to visit the exhibit, saying, “Go and look at these photographs. Behold the man of the eight beatitudes who bears in himself the grace of the Gospel, the Good News, the joy of salvation offered to us by Christ.” When he beatified him on May 20, 1990, he summarized his life by that image of man of the Beatitudes, stating, “By his example he proclaims that a life lived in Christ’s Spirit, the Spirit of the Beatitudes, is ‘blessed,’ and that only the person who becomes a ‘man or woman of the Beatitudes’ can succeed in communicating love and peace to others.” With courage, Blessed Pier Giorgio shows us in the midst of a world that hungers for money how to be poor in spirit and rich in what matters to God; at a time when people focus on military might, how to be a peacemaker and meek; in an age in which pornography, lust and the problems of Sodom and Gomorrah are destroying lives and families how to be pure of heart; in an epoch of increased religious persecution, how to rejoice and be glad, because of the reward in store in heaven.”  Bl. Pier Giorgio shows us what our liberation is for. St. John Paul II at his beatification for that reason called him the “man of the century,” because he shows us how to respond with courage to the signs of the times, to the great anxieties and fears of the time with faith, love, joy and courage.
• The way he was able to do this was by recognizing Christ was with him in the world. Rather than looking back at what he was giving up, like Lot’s wife, he looked toward Christ as an image of the Bride of Christ, put his hand to the plow and kept his vision “verso l’alto!,” with his face fixed on Christ, on his Cross, and on heavenly glory. He recalibrated his vision each day at daily Mass as he beheld the Lamb of God who each day came to be with him in Peter’s boat. He wrote to peers of “Catholic Youth” in Pollone in 1921, describing how to draw courage from the Eucharist, “I urge you with all the strength of my soul to approach the Eucharistic Table as often as possible. Feed on this Bread of the Angels from which you will draw the strength to fight inner struggles, the struggles against passions and against all adversities, because Jesus Christ has promised to those who feed themselves with the most Holy Eucharist, eternal life and the necessary graces to obtain it. And when you become totally consumed by this Eucharistic Fire, then you will be able to thank with greater awareness the Lord God who has called you to be part of his flock and you will enjoy that peace which those who are happy according to the world have never tasted.  Because true happiness, young people, does not consist in the pleasures of the world and in earthly things, but in peace of conscience which we can have only if we are pure in heart and in mind. After having fortified our spirit by applying ourselves with great diligence to works of mercy, …then we can throw ourselves into the apostolate.”  It’s through this contact with Jesus in the Eucharist, in which he enters us like he entered Peter’s boat, that we, too, no matter what storms we face, can remember each day that Christ not only cares, but acts for us, in us and through us. As we prepare to behold our Eucharistic Lord, we pray that God will give us the faith never to take our spiritual eyes off of him, to continue to look ahead and above, to become truly courageous, and to become his instruments so that others may see him more easily in us and come to find in him the same loving, eternally caring, Redeemer.

The readings for today’s Mass were:

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