Using Well The Freedom For Which Christ Has Set Us Free, 28th Monday (II), October 14, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Pope St. Callistus
October 14, 2024
Gal 4:22-24.26-27.31.5:1, Ps 113, Lk 11:29-32

To listen to the audio homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today in the first reading, we continue to explore the sharp contrast St. Paul has been making in his Letter to the Galatians between judaized Christians who thought we’re saved by our own efforts to keep all the precepts of the Mosaic Law, and the Christians he worked to form who grasped that we’re saved by God, by our response to the manifold graces he gives us. Using an allegorical style of interpretation he learned in rabbinical school, he described the two spiritualities flowing from Hagar through Ishmael and Sarah through Isaac, respectively, as a “yoke of slavery” versus a “freedom” in response to God’s “promise” (grace through the promised coming of the Messiah and his incarnation, passion and resurrection of Jesus) for which Christ has set us free. The Christians in Galatia were being persuaded by the Judaizers that they couldn’t be good Christians unless they yoked themselves entirely to the Mosaic law like the Scribes and Pharisees did. The law was lived by them not as an experience of freedom to love God and others maximally, but as a straightjacket in which many focused far more on the law — and all of the binding interpretations of the law made by the Scribes — than on God. St. Paul stressed that Christ, in fulfilling the Mosaic law, freed us from that slavery, and in the new and eternal Covenant, he sought to help us live by faith in the freedom of the truth as beloved sons and daughters of God.
• These two different spiritualities provide a context for us better to grasp what was happening in today’s Gospel. Many of the Jews who had been influenced by the Scribes and the Pharisees were seeking signs from Jesus, despite the fact that Jesus had been working many signs. Immediately before this scene, as we saw in Friday’s Gospel, Jesus had exorcised a demon from a possessed man, but Jesus’ critics refused to accept that sign as pointing to what it obviously spotlighted, that Jesus was working for God and trying to free people from the domain of the evil one. Instead, they pretended as if the miracle were a sign of another agency, that Jesus was casting out demons by the power of Beelzebul, the prince of demons. Likewise these same critics weren’t accepting any of Jesus’ other signs, his many miracles of healing and feeding. They were essentially only looking for signs that corresponded to their preconceived prejudices: if Jesus were the Messiah, then he would work signs that pointed to his liberating them from the Romans and establishing a political renewal of the Davidic Kingdom. If he were the Messiah, then everything he did, they thought, would be signs corresponding to and indeed confirming what they were laying the foundations to establish. The Messiah couldn’t possibly work signs that would contradict what they were expecting, they thought. So they sought miracles, but only those miracles that confirmed what they wanted confirmed. None of Jesus’ miracles seemed to be doing this, which is why they continued to seek signs. They were like children of Hagar, yoked to a slavery of their interpretation of the law and their rigid expectations as to how God would send a Messiah to save them. In contrast, we had on Saturday Jesus’ response to the shout of the anonymous woman, “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you,” when the Lord responded about the real thing that makes Mary most blessed of all: “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and observe it.” Jesus was looking for those who would receive the Word of God with faith and act on that saving word. These were children of Sarah … and of Mary.
• These two scenes set us up for Jesus’ words today when he says, “This generation is an evil generation; it seeks a sign.” We see just how evil the generation was when they conspired to frame Jesus before the Roman authorities they detested to have him executed for working signs they didn’t want to believe. Jesus replied by saying that no sign would be given to this evil generation except the sign of Jonah. That implies three things (as we’re able to ponder every Wednesday of the First Week of Lent):
  • First, it implies Jesus’ call to conversion. Jesus said, “At the judgment the men of Nineveh will arise with this generation and condemn it, because at the preaching of Jonah they repented, and there is something greater than Jonah here.” Jonah’s message of conversion, “Forty more days and Nineveh will be destroyed,” got the pagans of that enormously large city to convert, from the king to pets, immediately. They were all in sackcloth and ashes. But Jesus was saying that his message of conversion is a sign to an even deeper conversion that God wanted than at the time of Jonah. But the sign-seekers of the evil present generation were not interested in conversion.
  • Second, it implies Jesus’ wisdom. Jesus said, “At the judgment the queen of the south will rise with the men of this generation and she will condemn them, because she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and there is something greater than Solomon here.” The Ninevites accepted Jonah’s wisdom as coming from God. The Queen of Sheba journeyed over 1,660 miles over at least three months to hear Solomon’s wisdom, accounting it worth the sacrifice not just of many months round trip but also so much material wealth. Jesus’ wisdom, the wisdom that would have crowds amass to listen to him for hours, was a sign that he was speaking of a way to live, to die and to live forever that was far greater than anything Solomon ever taught. Jesus’ wisdom was a sign that he was not only continuing in the path of Solomon’s wisdom, but was the one to whom Solomon’s wisdom pointed. But the people of the evil generation were not interested in that wisdom.
  • Third, it implies Jesus’ suffering, death and resurrection, that he would spend three days in the belly of the earth just like Jonah spent three days in the belly of the whale (as St. Matthew’s version makes explicit). Jesus’ crucifixion would be a sign of how corrupt their hearts had become by co-conspiring to bring it about, but also the greatest sign of the love of the Lord who would die because, as Jesus prayed in his first words from the Cross, they didn’t really know what they were doing. Jesus’ resurrection itself would be the sign of the triumph of good over evil, light over darkness, life over death, and sanctity over sin. Jesus’ resurrection is the greatest sign in the history of the world. The crucified and risen One would be what St. Paul called in his first Letter to the Corinthians, the “power and the wisdom of God.” But as we see, even after Jesus’ three days in the belly of the earth and his resurrection, those in the evil and perverse generation didn’t want to accept that either.
• Today it’s important for us to become a “good and holy generation” in contrast to the receptivity of those whom Jesus was calling out in today’s Gospel. We’re called not only to accept the signs of Jesus’ call to conversion, his wisdom and his death and resurrection, but to become so united to him that we become signs of Jesus’ death and resurrection, signs of his wisdom, signs of his summons to conversion in the midst of the world. Jesus does that through the great signs he’s left us, signs that not only point to him doing certain spiritual work, but actually bringing that work about. We call those signs the sacraments, signs that affect what they signify. By Baptism, Jesus seeks to unite us to him so that we may become an efficacious sign of God’s presence in the world as his temple. By Confirmation, he fills us with the fire of the Holy Spirit so that we may continue his mission of proclaiming the Gospel of salvation to the whole world. By Reconciliation, he heals us of our sins and sends us out as walking advertisements that Jesus is the Lamb who wishes to take away the sins of others, too. By the Eucharist, Jesus unites us as members of his body, so that we can become one body, one spirit in Him, so that we can become his hands, his feet, his heart bringing his love to the world. By Matrimony, husbands and wives become signs of Jesus’ union with his Bride the Church, so that by their love for each other, Christian couples will remind everyone by the particularity of their mutual love of what Christ loves the Church and the Church loves Christ. By Holy Orders, priests are meant to remind everyone of Christ’s teaching, sanctifying and shepherding his people and are changed so that they might act in Christ’s very person communicating his life, especially through the Sacraments. And by the Anointing, we ponder the sign of Jesus’ healing that actually communicates a healing of the soul and often of the body, helping people to unite themselves to Christ’s own suffering, which is a sign not so much of pain but of the love that bears that pain. To our age and every age, Jesus continues to give us these signs through which he himself brings the reality to which these signs point. And we are called to use the freedom for which he set us free to choose to receive them and to live a genuinely sacramental life.
• Today we celebrate the feast of a saint who was a slave in life before he became a true servant of Christ and a servants of the servants of Christ. St. Callistus was a slave who managed his master’s assets. Eventually, either through mismanagement or theft, he lost them and ran away. He was caught, sentenced to manual labor (a particularly hard form of slavery) and sent to the mines. Through various interventions, the Christians in those mines were liberated. Callistus was eventually entrusted by Pope St. Zephyrinus as the steward of Christian cemeteries (the underground catacombs), was ordained a deacon, and after St. Zephyrinus’ death was elected his successor. And because he had made the journey from sin to grace, from slavery to freedom, in deeper contact with the Sign-of-Jonah and Greater-than-Solomon, he sought to make it possible for other to receive that gift. The mercy he showed toward sinners scandalized many of the priests of Rome and beyond as he made it much easier for those who had been misled by sects and heretics to be welcomed back into the fold, for reducing the length of penances necessary for those who had committed sins like murder, abortion, primitive contraception and apostasy to be readmitted to communion, and for recognizing the marriages among different social classes in Rome against Roman law. There were some — among them Hippolytus in Rome and Tertullian in Carthage — who thought he was mistaken to be so lenient, but it seems that they were much more concerned with giving strong penances to show the severity of sin than in recognizing conversion when it had happened and facilitating the life of grace. He also set up diakonia for the poor throughout the city and eventually gave all that he had, giving his life for God and for his people, making himself, freely, a slave to Christ in lovingly enslaving himself to those for whom Christ died. At the beginning of Mass, we asked God, through his intercession and by his example, to strengthen us so that “rescued from the slavery of corruption, we may merit an incorruptible inheritance.” That’s the purpose for which Christ has set us free. That’s the path of conversion to which he never ceases to summon us with urgency. That’s the way to live according to his wisdom.
• The Mass is our participation in Jesus’ fulfillment of the Sign of Jonah. We become here one with his call to conversion, one with his wisdom, one with suffering and death, and one with his risen life. With the freedom for which he has set us free, we ask God for the grace that we may recognize that here on the altar we have something far greater than Jonah and Solomon, that we are so blessed to be called to this supper of the Lamb, and that Jesus wants through this efficacious sign to transform us more and more into him, so that we may become through, with and in him, like Pope St. Callistus, living signs in the world calling others, as we prayed in the psalm, to bless the name of the Lord forever.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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