What Alone Counts: Faith Working Through Love, 28th Tuesday (II), October 15, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Teresa of Avila, Virgin and Doctor of the Church
October 15, 2024
Gal 5:1-6, Ps 119, Lk 11:37-41

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• There seems to be a serious contradiction in today’s readings. In the Psalm, we expressed a great love for the law of the Lord. “In your ordinances is my hope and I will keep your law continually,” we prayed, “because I seek your precepts. I will delight in your commands which I love, and I will lift up my hands to your commands and meditate on your statutes.” Yet in the first reading St. Paul implies that the law is a “yoke of slavery,” that circumcision, which featured prominently in the law, “does not count for anything,” and that those who are “trying to be justified by law” are “separated from Christ” and “fallen from grace.” In the Gospel, moreover, Jesus scandalized the Pharisee who had invited him to dinner because he didn’t undergo the elaborate hand-washing ritual that the Scribes prescribed had to be done before eating, pouring a one-and-a-half egg-shells worth of water down his folded hands from fingers to wrists, drying the water by making a fist and rubbing the other hand, only to repeat the gesture of another one-and-a-half egg-shells of water poured from wrists to finger tips. Jesus replied by calling the Pharisees “fools.” What is it? Is the law our hope, delight, and the substance of our prayerful meditation or is it worthless and foolish?
• This leads us to two central truths that need to be grasped in our faith. The first is the purpose of the law of God. As Jesus would say elsewhere in the Gospel, the entirety of the law and the prophets hangs on the two-fold command to love God with all we are and have and to love our neighbor. The second is that, on occasion in salvation history, some began to look at the law not within this lens of helping us to love God and others, but as an end in itself, almost even an idol. People, like the Scribes and the Pharisees Jesus confronts, and the Judaizers against whom St. Paul battles, began to focus more on the law than on the Legislator and those made in his image and likeness. Over time they began to create a system of interpretations and “fences” around the law (to try to prevent someone from even getting close to breaking it) that often directly opposed love of God and neighbor. We see this often in the Gospel when Jesus is accused of doing evil because he healed people on the Sabbath day, as if the only day we couldn’t love our sick neighbors was on the day of the Lord. The harmony that flows out of the apparent contradiction in today’s readings is that we are called to hope, seek, delight in, love, meditate upon and keep the law of the Lord continuously, but what God means by this is his law of love for God and for all those God loved enough to take on our human nature and die for. Some aspects of the law, like St. Paul described for us last week, were a “tutor” or “disciplinarian” meant to train us out of our fallen nature and help us to love God and neighbor in little things, preparing us to accept what Jesus the Master would come to teach as a fulfillment of that preparation. The law of circumcision, for example, consecrated human generation to God’s plans so that men and women would not forget that human love was meant to be part of the Covenant, but this physical act of consecration was surpassed in the new Covenant by a spiritual dedication: a circumcised heart was far more important than the snipping of foreskins (Deut 10:16; Deut 30:6; Jer 4:4). The dietary laws were likewise meant to consecrate one’s appetite for food to God’s plan, to train them to recognize that it was God who gave animals life (and hence the need to drain them of blood, which symbolizes life) and therefore that they should be slaughtered with a sense of gratitude to God and reverence for the way he has provided, so that even human instinctual behavior would be put into relation to God. After this period of training, Jesus and others would be able to carry out that consecration of food spiritually rather than by the physical draining of blood or the avoidance of certain animals.
• The goal of the pedagogy of salvation history, of meditating on the law of the Lord, is to grasp that the law seeks to bring us to what St. Paul says at the end of today’s first reading as “faith working through love,” to a trust in God, to a receptivity to all his gifts, that overflows into deeds of love for God and others. Jesus makes the same point at the end of today’s Gospel when he says, “As to what is within, give alms, and behold everything will be clean for you.” God wants to bring us to a living faith that is operative in love, something that many of the Scribes and Pharisees, because of the way they idolized their traditions surrounding the law, were not doing, as they opposed Christ’s miraculous acts of love on the Sabbath. St. James will tell us in his epistle that “faith without works is dead” (James 2:26). True Christian faith is shown by the way it leads us to try to love like God loves, by the way it makes us patient and kind and all the other attributes St. Paul describes in his Canticle of Love (1 Cor 13), by the way it helps us to sacrifice for God and our brothers and sisters, even to the point of laying down our lives for them. We clean our insides not by rituals of egg-shells of water but by self-giving love, which when done from the heart is the greatest spiritual detergent. Today is a day on which the Lord is calling us to ponder whether our faith bears fruit in generous giving of ourselves and what we have to others, whether our faith leads us to “work” for God and others with loving affection.
• Today we celebrate the feast of a saint whose life, like that of all the saints, is a commentary on faith working through love and on the almsgiving of a Christian life lived in communion with God. She showed how a strict religious rule like that by which she lived, especially in the convents she would found in the reformed Carmelite Order, was meant to unleash love, meant to enlarge our soul and communion with God, not restrict it. But her religious life didn’t start out that way. When she entered the Convent at 20, the Convent, in some ways, was like a Christian sorority. The rules of Carmelite conventual life, not to mention the Gospel, were constantly being watered down due to laxity and lukewarmness. There was no need, after all, to be “fanatical” about living the Christian life, some thought. She suffered a lot trying to reform Carmelite monasteries. She sought in particular to bring these houses back into shape so that they might serve as real schools of sanctity. She strived to lead them, as the opening prayer of the Mass attests, on the way of perfection.  As Jesus pointed to in the Gospel in reminding the Pharisees that it wasn’t enough to clean the outward appearance of a cup but that they needed to clean the insides as well, so St. Teresa taught that it wasn’t enough to wear the habit of a religious, but one needed to pray, to obey, and to have the heart of a religious.
• If we yet haven’t used our freedom for faith working through love, if we haven’t yet lived the commandments of God and precepts of the Church with joy and gratitude, St. Teresa’s life can give us inspiration, because she needed to convert to it later in life. She started off with great desires. When she was seven, she took great pleasure in the lives of the saints, making a little hermitage in her back yard where she could read and pray. One day her younger brother Rodrigo was in the back yard with her and they began to think about the happiness of the saints in heaven and got caught up in the thought of living “forever and ever and ever and ever and ever.” Rodrigo asked how they could get to heaven fastest, and Teresa replied that that would be through martyrdom, because the sufferings of the martyrs were nothing compared with the glory they received immediately upon death. Rodrigo asked how they could become martyrs and she said that they would need to go where the Muslims were in order to be killed by them for the faith. Rodrigo asked where the Muslims were and she told him in Morocco. And so off they went walking toward Morocco, forgetting — we can excuse 7 and 5 year olds! — the small geographical complication that there was the Mediterranean Sea between Spain and northern Africa! They got outside the city walls and as far as the ancient Roman Adaja Bridge when they were met by their Uncle Francisco coming back on his horse from hunting. He asked them where they were headed. When informed they were heading to Africa to be martyred by the Moors, he told them he would give them a ride on his horse. After they hopped on, he took them on a journey that eventually led them back to their home! The episode shows Teresa’s faith, courage and love for God from an early age. She was willing to suffer even earthly tortures — like the stories of the martyrs she read with her brother — for the sake of the Gospel. That deep desire never left her, but over the course of time, it attenuated. She entered the Carmelite monastery when she was 20, but the house was in a spiritual malaise. Some nuns had suites of rooms, with servants and pets. Eventually she succumbed to it herself, spending vast amounts of time entertaining visitors and friends in the parlor, giving herself over to various compromises with worldliness and vanity. It was only two decades later, when she was 39, that God reawakened her from her life according to the flesh, from her spiritual worldliness, from tolerating venial sins, trusting in herself, not valuing God’s grace, to a truly fervent life. She gave herself over to God and allowed herself to be led to reform Carmelite life as a whole. The Holy Spirit revivified her desire for holiness, for happiness, for heaven and he guided her through all the stages necessary to give her a foretaste of heavenly union here on earth through prayer. And her faith working through love changed the Carmelites, the Church, Spain and the whole world.
• Her writings described the various stages on which God led her, and leads us, along the way of perfection. She used the image of an Interior Castle with seven “mansions” (each containing many rooms) of prayer and of the spiritual life that leads to it and flows from it. The first mansion begins in the state of grace, but involves a lot of fighting against sin, especially pride. People are pulled by the material world and a desire for possessions, honor and power. The second mansion happens when the person seeks to advance through the castle through daily prayer, thoughts of God, humble recognition of God’s work in the soul, sermons, edifying conversations, good company and other means. The third mansion happens when, moved by grace, the person has a love for God so great that the person has a total aversion to all sin including venial and a desire to do works of love for others for God’s glory. The person begins to have less self-reliance and become more dependent on God. The person has generally reached a high standard of virtue, self-discipline, penance and prudence. These are all stages that are meant to happen in everyone who follows the guidance of the Holy Spirit in ordinary Catholic life. The fourth stage is one of contemplative prayer, when the person no longer seeks to acquire or grow by one’s own efforts but allows God to lead, even in prayer. The person begins to attach lesser importance to the things of this world and far more to God. The person decreases and God increases and experiences many spiritual consolations, like the prayer of Quiet. It no longer shrinks from trials. The fifth mansion initiates a union of wills in which the person develops a complete trust in God’s will. There’s no longer a need to control events or lose much time over petty worries, something that opens the person to receive more and more gifts from God. It’s a spiritual betrothal and the faculties of the soul can often go “asleep” in prayer as the soul is completely possessed by God. The sixth mansion is when the person is torn away from outside afflictions and begins to experience not just a betrothal but a love between Lover and Beloved that lasts for long periods of time full of intimacy. It often involves some intense suffering (physical, spiritual, often misunderstanding from others and occasionally a sense of abandonment comparable to the pains of hell) in which through the Cross one’s union with God and longing for God grows. The person begins to become increasingly occupied in the things of God and can have difficulty in every day practical issues. In the seventh mansion, there is a spiritual marriage in which two candles become one, where there is complete transformation and profound peace, when inadvertent venial sins are still possible but there’s great fruitfulness in prayer and action. The person can now fulfill his or her duties without difficulty because there’s a union with God in doing them, as one is engaged fully in the service of God and others with great calm and self-forgetfulness. St. Teresa considered this way of perfection within the reach of everyone who allows the Holy Spirit to lead. She would encourage us to abandon ourselves to the Holy Spirit and let him lead us through the various rooms of each mansion according to God’s pace until, God-willing, we enter into the mansions where we, with her, will live and love God “forever and ever and ever.”
• The great font of her spiritual life, the greatest means of perfection, the way she was strengthened in faith and in the love of God and others was the daily celebration of the Mass. St. Teresa drew her strength from the Eucharist. She was Teresa of Jesus, the Jesus she received within and loved ardently each day. She advised us in her Way of Perfection, “After having received the Lord, since you have the Person Himself present, strive to close the eyes of the body and open those of the soul and look into your heart. For I tell you again, and would like to tell you many times that you should acquire the habit of doing this every time. … Though He comes disguised, the disguise … does not prevent Him from being recognized in many ways, in conformity with the desire we have to see Him. And you can desire to see Him so much that He will reveal Himself to you entirely” (34:12). She wrote in her Meditations on the Song of Songs, “I think that if we were to approach the Most Blessed Sacrament with great faith and love, once would be enough to make us rich. How much richer from approaching so many times as we do. The trouble is we do so out of routine, and it shows” (M 3.13).
• Today we come not out of routine, but with hunger to be filled with him, to be filled with his riches to overflowing. To become Roger of Jesus, Madeline of Jesus, Jack of Jesus, Ally of Jesus. At Mass, we come together to meditate upon and delight in the true law of the Lord, which is this law of faith working through love, what St. Paul says alone counts. Jesus comes to help us to cleanse our insides and to inspire us to follow his Eucharistic example, giving the alms of our body and our blood out of love for God and others, so that our insides will be made clean and so that one day we’ll have a chance, by God’s mercy, to enter into friendship with him, with St. Teresa of Jesus and all the saints forever.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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