Valuing Others Aright: Persons over Pigs and Even Kingdoms, Fourth Monday (II), January 31, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the Fourth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. John Bosco
January 31, 2022
2 Sam 15:13-14.30;16:6-13, Ps 3, Mk 5:1-20

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today’s Gospel is about more than one more dramatic exorcism from Jesus. It points to something that needs to be exorcised from all of us in every age. After Jesus frees this man from a legion of demons — and a legion in the Roman army was 600 troops — by casting them into a herd of 2,000 pigs who, now possessed, ran off a cliff and drowned in the Sea of Galilee, the people of that pagan region of the Gerasenes didn’t rejoice at the liberation of the man who used to gouge himself with stones, break chains that attempted to bind him, and terrorize the people of the region; they didn’t come to Jesus to ask him likewise to free the other possessed people in the region, or to cure their sick or to teach them; instead, they asked him to leave their region. Jesus was bad for business. They worried that if he stayed he might next endanger their sheep, too, or their grain, or other aspects of their livelihood. They essentially cared more for the swine they had lost than the brother they had gained.
• This is not a problem just for ancients. Still today, people can give possessions primacy over people, allowing people to be disturbed, even possessed, as long as their possessions are left undisturbed. Pope Francis wrote about this in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium: “How can it be that it is not a news item,” he asks, “when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?” For many people, the stock market is more important than people dying through neglect. And this is one of the greatest ways the devil seeks to possess multitudes, through the concupiscence of the eyes or materialism. We remember the way he tried to tempt Jesus in the desert to set his sights on material bread, by turning stones into bread, to become a baker instead of a savior, to focus on his stomach more than his soul, on himself more than God. But Jesus refused, saying we live on more than bread, but by every word that comes from God’s mouth. This is what uniting ourselves to Jesus’ spiritual poverty through the profession of the evangelical counsel of poverty makes possible.
• People are more important than things and we must remember this and live by it. We’re in a culture today in which if a human being is still very much alive but in a persistent vegetative state, many think that we need to let the person die in order to save more money for the care of others. What this really means is to make profits for some by allowing people to die. It’s to put things before love, possessions before people. And when possessions become dominant, we ask Jesus to leave just like the Gerasenes did, because Jesus is constantly telling us to treat the poor the way we would treat him. And if we would ignore a man’s dying of exposure or resent rather than rejoice at a possessed man’s liberation what we’re essentially saying is we don’t care if Jesus were to die of exposure or if Jesus were to be gashing himself with stones — attitudes that already show that we don’t want to have room for Jesus, we really don’t want him to stay.
• We see a similar objective and subjective dehumanization at work in what’s pointed to by today’s first reading. On Saturday, we heard God through Nathan tell King David that the sword would never depart from his house and today we see how David’s son Absalom, many years after David’s quadruple sin of lust, adultery, deception and murder, raised the sword to try to take his father’s kingdom. It would have been very easy for King David to have responded to the betrayal of his son with anger and pride. He could have said, “I have killed people by the tens of thousands and defeated Goliath. I am the greatest warrior and general in the history of this nation and have forgotten ten times more than Absalom and his partisans will ever learn about warfare. I’ll teach my son and every other insurrectionist a lesson they’ll never forget.” But he didn’t do this. His son was more important than his kingdom. He also realized that if he put up resistance in Jerusalem, many innocent citizens would end up losing their lives, and he recognized that their lives were more important than his kingdom. He grasped that Absalom’s betrayal was a penance for his own betrayal of God many years earlier. He entrusted himself to God and left the city in penitential fashion, with his head covered and his feet exposed. Even when Shimei started to curse and stone David along the path out of the city and Abishai asked David for the permission to “lop off his head,” David refused, because Shimei’s life was more important than David’s pride. David simply entrusted himself and his fate to God. How much civil rulers need to learn from this example! Over the course of history and still today, people have been repeatedly used as pawns in their ruler’s disputes. When rulers’ pride or possessions are threatened, they have declared war on each other, not even knowing the names of the soldiers who would die defending their honor, not knowing the mothers who would weep for their sons, the wives who would weep for their husbands, the children who would mourn their slain fathers.
• Today the Church celebrates the feast of someone who had particular concern for those whom society had written off and wanted rid of. St. John Bosco was born in 1815 in the small village of Becchi close to Turin in northern Italy. When he was just two, his father died leaving his mother Margherita to care for the three young boys as a peasant farmer during a time of great drought and social unrest. She was a woman of great faith who did all she could, but even at a young age John needed to be apprenticed to an uncle. And he was one of the lucky ones that he had an uncle to whom he could be sent when his mother no longer could feed him. When he was nine, he had a dream that changed his life. In it, he was surrounded by a group of children who were fighting, swearing and blaspheming. He tried to calm them down, first by reasoning, then with force, but to no avail. Finally a lady appeared to him — whom he later concluded was the Blessed Mother — and said, “Softly, softly, if you wish to win them! Take your shepherd’s staff and lead them to pasture.” As he gently invited and encouraged them to follow him, he saw them transformed from wild beasts into lambs. When he awoke, he knew that his duty was to help poor boys, beginning with those in his own village, to undergo such a transformation. He first sought the kids who were hanging out and causing trouble in the city squares. He did his best to teach them the catechism and invite them to Church, but there were initially few takers. He noticed how much they were fascinated, however, by the various jugglers, magicians and gymnasts who would come through town seeking their adulation and money. So he began to learn those arts — and master them. Soon he was challenging the other jugglers, conjurers and acrobats to competition and beating them. His prize was the attention of the young ruffians, to whom he promised to teach his newfound skills after they had a catechism lesson or came to Church. But he readily saw that there were limits to what he could give them as a poor and poorly-educated shepherd boy. He desired to become a priest. Eventually a priest, too, recognized in him signs of a priestly vocation. He was taught how to read so that he would be able to go to school and seminary. His upkeep and his clothes were provided by charity, the mayor paid for his hat, the pastor his coat, one parishioner his cassock, another a pair of shoes. During seminary he would continue to go out on Sundays to draw the boys to Mass and make sure these waifs — whom few cared for and so many wanted to be rid of — would be taken care of. It was during seminary that St. Joseph Cafasso, the seminary rector just a few years his senior, recognized his vocation to give his entire life to the care of these abandoned, lost sheep, seeking to love them with the love of Christ and bring them to live by faith truly Christian lives. St. John Bosco organized activities on Sundays but very few people wanted hundreds of street kids around them, and so he struggled to find a permanent place. Eventually he got a big barn and began to build it up. He founded schools to train them as shoemakers, tailors and printers. He began to give them accommodations so they weren’t sleeping on the streets and entrusted their care to his mother Margherita who came to live with them. His orphanage would grow to house more than 800 boys for whom he would beg for food. Some of the bright boys he would eventually begin training to be priests to serve young people like these in the Salesian order God would lead him to found. These young people, who were perpetually falling through the cracks of society, who often were tempted to become social troublemakers because of neglect and various abuses, he deemed, worthy of his life and his love.
• He got this love from a deep focus on Christ as the Good Shepherd who would hunt down every lost sheep, and from our Lady, who had immense motherly love for every child entrusted to her by her Son. St. John Bosco yearned for everyone in the Church to learn how to care for these boys with the love of the Good Shepherd and Our Lady, mother and help of Christians. This was solidified by a dream he revealed to the boys on May 30, 1862, when he was 46 years old. He told all the orphans he was housing that a few nights before, he had a dream in which he had seen a huge naval battle in which a big ship guided by the Pope with a flotilla of other boats led by bishops, was being attached by so many opposing forces, who were trying to ram and sink the barque of Peter. The winds and the ferocious waves were against the papal fleet. But then he saw two huge pillars coming out of the sea. At the top of one stood Mary, Help of Christians, and at the top of the other was a huge Host underneath which was the inscription “Salvation of the Faithful.” Don Bosco saw in his dream that the Pope and the boats in his flotilla labored to anchor themselves to these two pillars and once they did, the opposing ships were scattered and broken to pieces. St. John Bosco interpreted the dream as an indication of the types of attacks, the opposing winds and seas, the salvos of enemies that would try to sink the Church, but he also saw the remedy: anchoring oneself to Jesus in the Eucharist and to the Mother who gave us that blessed Fruit of her womb and shows us how to relate to him in faith. Anchoring ourselves to the God-man and to the one who shows us how to receive him and respond to him will keep us in the love of God and of neighbor, even in the midst of a dehumanizing age.
• Today the same Jesus who cast the demons out of the swine comes to cast himself into us. When we ask, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?,” he replies that he hasn’t come here to destroy us but rather to sanctify us. He has come not to torment us but to teach and spiritually strengthen us. He will not tell us to be quiet but to tell us to proclaim from the rooftops his Gospel. He wants to cast himself into us that we will all rush out and not drown in the Sea of Galilee but bring others to bathe themselves in the graces flowing from baptism and in the Living Water coming from his pierced side. We beg him not to depart from us but to remain with us and, like he gave St. John Bosco, to give us the grace to announce not just to our family but to all those he wants as members of his family what the Lord in his mercy has done for us and what he in his love wants to do for them.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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